"Yes, Me Too"

“Yes, Me Too”

In church growth and vitality circles, you can often hear the adage that the AA meetings that happen in our church buildings do church better than many churches do. Oftentimes, I’ve heard that framed in terms of welcome. It’s true that everyone who walks through the doors of a 12-step meeting is welcomed, quickly connected to the group, and given a role from setting out chairs to making coffee.

But there’s more than welcome going on here. 12-step groups aren’t filled with people whose lives are going pretty well, people who want to reach a hand out (and perhaps also down) to include people out of a sense of magnanimity. Instead, it’s about people gathering around the shared recognition that their lives are completely unmanageable without God, and that people who have turned their lives and their wills over to the care of God are always in the process of repeating the steps of surrender, self-examination, repentance, and making amends. It’s about people gathering around a shared honesty about our human weakness – and yes, about our capacity for sin – and saying to each other “yes, me too. You aren’t alone in your struggles.” In doing so, there is always a return to the beginning. Self-offering to God isn’t a one-and-done act, it’s a continuous process. When we say the confession each week before communion, we say to each other as well as to God, “yes, me too.” 

In a little essay called The Return to Baptism, Robert Jenson reminds us that “What we do between baptism and the kingdom…is not to march forward from baptism into something else but rather again and again to return to baptism – indeed, to creep back into it. Once it has been said, it is clear that this is the only answer that Christianity can give” about the character of the Christian life.

At Trinity, we’re blessed to have far more baptisms than the average Episcopal parish. Every time we do, we all are given the opportunity to return to our own baptism, to give ourselves to God all over again. One of the questions asked at baptism, and which we all answer as we reaffirm our baptismal covenant, is:

“Will you persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?”

When we say as a congregation, “I will with God’s help,” that’s another way of saying “yes, me too.” And when we do so, I pray that we are all reminded that we aren’t alone in our struggles.

Yours in Christ,

Kara+

Be Still and Know That I Am God

Psalm 46:10

There are approximately 9 times in the Gospels where Jesus went off to a quiet place to pray. One of the earliest is at the very beginning of his ministry. It takes place in Mark’s Gospel and after Jesus was baptized and went into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan. It comes after he started his itinerant preaching and healing in Galilee. After healing many people, Mark writes: In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. (Mk 1:35) Jesus, probably exhausted, needed time alone with his Father and listen to what his Father needed to say to him or to rest in God’s presence within him. Rather than going to a temple or other recognizable place for prayer, Jesus needed time in the quiet to be still and listen.

For the first sixteen centuries, Christian spirituality’s goal was contemplative prayer. The practice of contemplative prayer is based on the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers who lived solidary lives or in small communities devoted to prayer during the third and fourth centuries. Saint Anthony the Great of Egypt, circa 251-356, is considered the father of this movement. The movement spread to Palestine, Syria, and Arabia. In Western Europe, the movement led to the establishment of monasteries under the Rule of Saint Benedict which was written between 530 to 540 CE by Benedict of Nursia at the Monte de Cassino Monastery in Italy. Monasticism thrived in Western Europe until the reformation when Henry VIII ransacked and destroyed the monasteries in England as did other countries in Western Europe.

During the 1960s, many young people turned to Eastern religions for meditation. To help people understand the long and rich history of contemplative prayer in Western Christianity, three Trappist monks, Frs. Thomas Keating, William Meninger, and Basil Pennington began writing about the contemplative tradition in Christianity. This became known as Centering Prayer. This form of prayer is based on an anonymous spiritual work of the fourteenth century entitled “The Cloud of Unknowing.” The book was written in Middle English making it accessible to the average English-speaking person.

Centering Prayer is a form of contemplative prayer that helps us to open ourselves to “God’s presence and action within [us].” It is a posture of receiving and listening to our God who is within and around us.

 The method of Centering Prayer is simple:

1.    Choose a sacred word, such as love, peace, Jesus, Abba, Mother.  This expresses our intention to be in God’s presence.

2.    Sit comfortably with eyes closed. Introduce the sacred word.

3.    When you become aware of thoughts, return gently to your sacred word.

4.    At the end of the prayer time, (usually 20 minutes), remain in silence for a few minutes.

I started a Centering Prayer practice about 30 years ago. If you are interested in learning more about Centering Prayer, please reach out to me at connors@trinityprinceton.org. Also, there is a national organization, Contemplative Outreach, which continues to teach and educate about Centering Prayer.

Their website is https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org.

Blessings,

Fr. Steve

Fellowship Is (Also) Formation

In the Baptismal Covenant, we promise to "continue in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers." Right there, in the commitments we make to God and to each other, teaching and fellowship go together. The early Church could never have imagined that we could be formed in faith apart from one another, or that friendship alone, without shared learning and prayer, would make us disciples.

We sometimes treat fellowship as the pleasant extra, the gathering of old friends and new after the “real work” of worship and study. But formation happens at those tables too. We learn patience from the person who disagrees with us about the hymn choices. We learn generosity from the parishioner who checks in on a friend they haven’t seen in a while. We learn hope from the longtime member who has kept faith through decades of change. Christ forms us not in isolation but through the Body.

The reverse is also true: our fellowship and friendship deepens when it is rooted in something larger than shared interests. Studying Scripture together, praying the Daily Office together, asking honest questions together bind us more closely than small talk ever could.

This fall, I invite you to join one of our fellowship groups and attend one of our opportunities for formation. You won’t regret it!

In Christ,

Mtr. Kara