Monthly Archives

March 2019

Truthfulness and Prayer

Self-Honesty as a Solvent

Tim: As our Lenten conversations with Howard Thurman continue, he keeps returning to prayer.

Shea: In this week’s readings (Days 19-24 in the 40-Day Journey with Howard Thurman) he ties truthfulness to prayer.

Tim: It’s an essential connection, as prayer’s efficacy relies entirely on our honesty.

Shea: We should be honest and real in all we do. But especially when we deal with God, we should go into our prayer times with every intention of being truthful.

Tim: That makes perfect sense. Some would go so far as to suggest self-honesty before God is the default position, since God—being in all and knowing all—is already aware of our needs and weaknesses and desires. That’s what some folks would say.

Shea: Why do I suspect there’s a big “however” coming?

Tim: However, our honesty is neither virtuous nor beneficial to God. That premise turns on an internal contradiction: if God already knows everything about us, why should our candor matter? Self-honesty in prayer doesn’t bless God. It blesses us.

Shea: Thurman says when we pray honestly, we come away with “a sense of being totally understood, completely dealt with, thoroughly experienced, and utterly healed.” We determine how satisfactory our prayer lives are. It’s one of those classic Thurman moments when the reader says, “Of course I know this. It makes perfect sense—so why am I not being 100% honest in my prayer life?”

Tim: There are all kinds of reasons why we hold back in prayer. Some of us are still stuck with this idea that prayer should be approached with exalted language and polite deference. Hard to be candid when you’re trying to write love poetry on the fly! More of us, I think, haven’t learned to be honest with God because we’ve not learned to be honest with ourselves. We don’t want to tell God the truth, because that requires us to admit truths we’d prefer to ignore. I think that’s what Thurman pushes us to overcome, our self-deception.

Shea: That calls us to confess our sins and we’re not cool with that. So much easier to pray for other sinners than to tell God how messed up we are! Yet Thurman gives us an arresting image: he says honest prayer works like solvent that dissolves sin “and the virus begins to be checked in its breeding place.” How can you not love that?

Tim: From there, he summons us to be people of prayer, prayerfully moving through the world, in the self-honesty that comes from prayer, and in the peaceful order that prayerfulness brings.

Shea: Honest prayer settles everything down—our inner selves and our surroundings. The solvent clears up the fogginess and cobwebs that get in our way.

Tim: We’re going to do some honest, prayerful spring-cleaning this week. I’m looking forward to it!

Shea: Amen and ashé! It is so!

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

Encountering God in the Ordinary

“Lord, Lord, open unto me!” – Howard Thurman

Shea: Too often, I expect to encounter God in larger-than-life experiences.

Tim: Oh yea, those colossal moments where the impossible breaks into our lives. The scriptures are full of them. You know, those earth-wide-flood-ladders-to-heaven-burning-bush-sea-splitting-sun-standing-still type moments.

Shea: Yep. I look for moving mountains or listen for an audible voice to resound from heaven. We read about these fantastical events and expect to encounter God in these types of ways. But I wonder if in doing so we miss the continual ways we are already encountering the divine in daily life? I think we need to recalibrate how we talk and think about this, which can retune our expectations.

Tim: Recalibrating our expectations—say more.

Shea: Gladly. One of the things that I love about Howard Thurman’s work is how he sees the divine in nature and, as a result, in every day encounters—a sunrise, an old oak tree, the mountains standing tall in the distant landscape. These encounters we too often take for granted or dismiss as mundane. They don’t meet our lofty expectations, so we dismiss them as ordinary.

Tim: Perhaps we become too accustomed to the beauty around us? How do we recapture that sense of wonder?

Shea: I think it begins with the seemingly small things we do frequently. Take prayer, for example. For many of us, prayer can become routinized in a way that diminishes the magnitude of the act! Perhaps we think it’s a one-way echo chamber instead of a dynamic conversation that radically reimagines and reshapes life itself. There is no such thing as “ordinary.” Everything is alive with the animating life of God.

Tim: Prayer as a revolutionary act?

Shea: Yes! In prayer, we are opened up. Here, in this postured place, we become aware of God’s presence in us like waves in the sea. The Spirit hovers over those waters and ebbs and flows like the tide. All of a sudden, we become aware that God is always already with us. In search of the divine encounter, what we find is an awakening to the divine reality that we live in dynamic relationship with God. It’s not just communication, but communion.

Tim: Amen. May we repeat the wise mystic’s prayer: “Lord, open unto me!”

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

Being Christian

Faith and the Journey Metaphor

 

Tim: I have something to confess. I’m not a fan of the journey metaphor. Every time I hear people talk about “their journey,” something in me winces.

Shea: Why is that?

Tim: I’m not sure. It’s a very useful construct for contemplating one’s life and spiritual maturity. I get that. But when I hear folks claim, “It’s not the destination, it’s all about the journey,” I feel my head tilting to one side.

Shea: Because…

Tim: Well, it is about the destination; it has to be. Otherwise, it’s not a journey. It’s just wandering. And I think it’s important always to be moving toward something, mostly because I believe faith is inherently aspirational. How did the writer of Hebrews define faith? “The reality of what we hope for, the proof of what we don’t see.”

Shea: Faith compels you to aspire to know and experience and see things beyond your present reality. Howard Thurman points us in that direction with this week’s readings.

Tim: That’s what got me thinking about this. He’s especially eloquent when talks about how slaves of the American South viewed their lives as “a pilgrimage.” Thurman says their spirituals often pointed beyond “the vicissitudes of life” to a “true home of the spirit with God.” When we make it all about “the journey” and lose sight of the destination, I think we get lost.

Shea: So let’s expand on this for a minute. If we think of being Christian as a journey, then we should seek a destination of some kind. Traditionally, that would be the afterlife, correct? Follow Jesus straight up to heaven. But we both know that’s a perilous idea, because some folks mistake that to mean that there’s no point doing anything to improve life here on earth.

Tim: It’s escapist theology, not what Jesus or the Apostles taught. Their intent was radically changing the world—not merely prepping for life beyond the grave. And I don’t think the slave spirituals were only about going to heaven after their hellish existence was over. I believe they knew something we often forget with all our “journey” sentimentality. They knew life with God—a true home of the spirit—was possible in the midst of hell on earth.

Shea: You can feel that in the their lyrics and melodies. They’re going somewhere, but not only in the end, in the great beyond. They’re going somewhere in the here and now.

Tim: Yes! And I think that’s where Thurman directs our attention this week. Being Christian isn’t only about “the journey.” It puts us on the path of becoming something now, something beyond ourselves, something we can’t manage without divine grace and mercy and goodness.

Shea: Amen to that! Which is why the Lenten wilderness is so important. We’re not simply wandering around for the “journey experience.” We’re becoming something.

Tim: That’s the idea. We’ll be exploring this notion of being Christian and becoming this Thursday. I’m looking forward to it.

Shea: I am too!

Join us each Thursday in Lent as we delve more deeply into our spiritual lives with the help of the great 20th century pastor, activist, and mystic Howard Thurman. We meet each week at 7:30pm in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

The “Hereness” of God

Present and Trustworthy

 

SHEA: We’re starting our new series and we have an amazing conversation partner.

TIM: We sure do! We’ll be spending Lent with the legendary 20th-century theologian, pastor, activist, and mystic, Howard Thurman. And when you’re in his company, you can expect to see things in fresh, provocative ways.

SHEA: Thurman has had a profound influence on modern Christianity, especially seminarians and pastors—and we’re two of them!

TIM: What makes his prominence especially sweet is how few people who knew him as a young person would have predicted the stature he achieved.

SHEA: He was born in meager circumstances in Florida, but raised by strong parents and grandparents—

TIM: Oh yes. You can’t go too far in his writing or theology without bumping them. They were all deeply committed Christians and magnificent theologians in their own right.

SHEA: Then, as Thurman went on to lead one of the nation’s first interdenominational integrated churches just after World War II and hold positions at Howard and Boston University, the knowledge his parents and grandmother instilled in him became foundational to work.

TIM: He also met and learned from Mahatma Gandhi, which led to his formulation of radical nonviolence as the fulfillment of Jesus’s ideal of God’s kingdom.

SHEA: And he became a major contributor to Martin Luther King Jr.’s message.

TIM: It’s no stretch to say Thurman pastored King. Time after time when he needed strength and clarity Dr. King went back to Dr. Thurman.

SHEA: So why are we embarking on this year’s Lenten journey with Howard Thurman?

TIM: Well, the wisdom and spirituality that we attribute to Thurman is timeless. But it’s especially powerful during periods when we’re drawn to introspective practices. His voice resonates in meditative and reflective moments, when we’re examining our own lives and beliefs. And his message most definitely found its roots in scripture.

SHEA: We’re beginning our desert walk in Jeremiah 17, which (appropriately) paints a picture between those whose lives are barren and those who thrive. Jeremiah sees trust in God as the determining factor.

TIM: Thurman expands on that by describing what we might call the “hereness” of God. He reminds us the active presence of God goes beyond “nearness” or a kind of vague awareness that God is working in the world. For Thurman, to say “God is here” is to confess God is trustworthy and present in every aspect of our lives. This divine “hereness” is the bedrock of our faith.

SHEA: If we’re walking through Lent’s desert with Howard Thurman, we’re going to have the pleasure—and intense challenge—of finding God in unlikely places, at moments when it feels like God is everywhere and other times when it seems like God is nowhere.

TIM: I pray this will be a life-changing Lent for us all.

SHEA: Amen!

Join us each Thursday night in Lent as we travel with Howard Thurman. To make the most of your experience, we recommend picking up 40-Day Journey With Howard Thurman (Augsburg Press, available at amazon and other online book retailers). We meet every Thursday at 7:30pm, in the Resource Room of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.