Sunday, October 22, 2006

Monastery of the Holy Spirit



I took a small group of folks from my church to the Monastery in Conyers, GA this saturday. It was a beautiful day and just the thing we all needed. We were there from 10:30 till 3:30 with no agenda but to sit in silence, meditate, and pray. The amazing thing was that I didn't think of football one time all day and couldn't believe that the day was over when it was. The others felt the same as well. There's something about simply being in God's presence in a way that you can acknowledge that is not contrived, shallow, or pietistic. I'm finally beginning to meet the God of my adulthood, though I've known of and worshipped that God for some time now. That God has supplanted the one-dimensional God of my upbringing, bringing me into the complexity of the triune God who stands for everything that God used to be but so very much more.

I read a book on justice and contemplation. I'm really trying to plumb the depths of what it means to pursue the active life contemplatively. The notion of the inward and outward journeys actually being the same path intrigues me. For most of us, if we're even aware of both the inward and outward journeys, our journeys remain disconnected and one of them dominates the other. Works such as Parker Palmer's "A Hidden Wholeness" exemplify this connection.

How do I unifty Mary and Martha? Or how do I find the Martha in Mary and the Mary in Martha? Posted by Picasa

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