Author: David

Now here is a suggestion for you: to take a body map – your body. Go to some place, perhaps outside sitting under a tree or inside some place that is cozy, maybe some place where you can dim the lights, even light a candle, and to map your body from the top of your head to the bottom of your toes. How do you see yourself? How do you see your face or features of your face? Work your way literally through your entire body. Where do you find your own belovedness? Where are you amazed with your body – maybe what your hands can do? Where do you find sadness or pain? Where do you see brokenness or scarring? What doesn’t work? What do you wish were different and why do you wish it? See where you are wounded and where you really need healing. The invitation here is to be aware of how you carry yourself through life and to accept an invitation from God to see yourself as God sees you with the eyes of love, amazement, devotion. You are God’s child whom God adores.

– Br. Curtis Almquist

Today’s Question to Journal

How does it feel to imagine God looking at you – with adoring love?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Own Self

Spend time now recording some of the key points you want to recall related to your relationship with self. 
Use the exercise to consider each question, starting with the head and moving down to the toes.

Something I am learning about myself is that in engaging with creativity, with creative process, I am a drawer and a painter, so that’s one area what I can think about creativity a balance between allowing myself to engage with that creativity in a way that is hoping for a tangible outcome and also giving myself time to engage with that without the pressure of any outcome coming from it, so just delighting in the process. I think that’s really useful for me not to get stuck or paralyzed. And so I think a similar dynamic applies to prayer, that allowing yourself to be surprised or to break out of a particular routine in terms of the ways of praying that might be most comfortable or most time tested for myself. Allowing myself to be surprised or to occasionally take productive detours in my prayer life.

– Br. Keith Nelson

Today’s Question to Journal

How are you creative?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Own Self

Spend time now recording some of the key points you want to recall related to your relationship with self. 
Use the exercise to consider each question, starting with the head and moving down to the toes.

Jesus in one of his parables speaks of the farmer who plants the seed – and it grows, he knows not how. The hiddenness of growth I think is an aspect also of growing into and forming a Rule of Life. One of the aspects that I have learned of that hiddenness is embracing limitations. Embracing what might be seen as weaknesses and seeing them as perhaps the alternative side of one’s graces and gifts, with various limitations that come about through age or with health problems, with perhaps the fleeting of memory, or the vigor of being able to work at the pace that one might have in the past or even to take part in the life of the Christian community. I think there is a hiddenness of grace that reflects in all of our relationships – with one another, with ourselves, and with God. Embracing the frailty of our human nature is a way of giving thanks to God. Forming ourselves in a Rule that is full of gratitude, expresses and embraces all the aspects of the mystery that we are before God as a particular image and likeness of God, which no other is.

It is also a way of us preparing for the new life, the new life that we begin to experience even now this side of the grave. A life in which we have interdependence one with another, a dependence on God that is an intimate one, one that is able to relax into the fullness of each day and each experience, without making judgments about them, but rather seeing all as gift and treasure as we are remade in Christ’s image.

– Br. Jonathan Maury

Today’s Question to Journal

What frailties or weaknesses in yourself might you befriend?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Own Self

Spend time now recording some of the key points you want to recall related to your relationship with self. 
Use the exercise to consider each question, starting with the head and moving down to the toes.

When I was growing up I was what you would call “divorced” from my body, from my physicality, my embodiment in the world, because for a long time I didn’t see it as a resource, as a place of safety. I saw it as something to run away from. It contained some really painful emotions. And then sometime in my late 20s, I discovered dance, quite by accident, and I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that dance saved my life, because it was a means of expressing myself through movement, of using my body for something creative. It allowed me to get in touch with those parts of myself that I had denied for a very long time. It wasn’t all very pleasant because it allowed me to get in touch with things living in my body that, like I said, were very painful. But as I worked my way through those, I was able to get to a point where my body was seen as – or I was able to see my body as a very beautiful resource that I can bring to my prayer life, that I can bring to all sorts of activities. And it was in recognizing how beautiful my body was that inspired me to want to honor it and treat it right, both through diet, physical exercise and of course, at the time, more dancing.

I think in creating a Rule of Life I think it is important to include elements within it that allow us to honor our bodies, to include our bodies as part of our entire experience in the world, not as something to be divorced from. Often times when praying it is easy to the mistake of being all in our heads. But the desert fathers repeated again and again how important it was to descend from our heads into our hearts and to live in our bodies. So I would encourage people creating a Rule of Life to include that element. To have some reminder that in the Rule itself that says, “I value my body. God sees my body as beautiful and I am going to include it as a resource in my life of prayer dedicated to God.”

– Br. Nicholas Bartoli

Today’s Question to Journal

How has your relationship with your body changed; how might it change?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Own Self

Spend time now recording some of the key points you want to recall related to your relationship with self. 
Use the exercise to consider each question, starting with the head and moving down to the toes.

In this week of our growing a Rule of Life, we are focusing on your relationship to yourself. There are some wonderful words in the prophecy of Isaiah: “You are precious in my sight and honored and I love you.” We have been created by the love of God, for the love of God, in the love of God. This is what God is up to, and God is up to in your life. This is how God is operating, so cooperate. Cooperate with how God is operating in your life. How you love yourself will make a world of difference in how you relate to others. It will set the bar for how you relate to others. Loving yourself is so important. You’re worth it.

Some of us have qualifiers. Some of us have had “weeds” sown into the ground of our being, which may go all the way back to childhood and they’ve never been eradicated from the garden of our soul. I have got some drive inside of me that says “should” a lot. I should be able to get this done, I should be able to do this, I should be able to perform or complete something at a certain level – and I seldom get to that level. And for me what I get in touch with is some weeds that go way back, which I have not yet completely eradicated, and for which often times I need help with fellow gardeners to be able to live a whole life and really, really bloom.

– Br. Curtis Almquist

Today’s Question to Journal

What do you love about yourself?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Own Self

Spend time now recording some of the key points you want to recall related to your relationship with self. 
Use the exercise to consider each question, starting with the head and moving down to the toes.

This week, we’ve been exploring our relationship with God. We hope you have enjoyed it and we hope you have found something sustaining and inviting. And we’d like to invite you now to sit down and spend some time reflecting on your relationship with God in prayer, and reflecting on ways in which you can help sustain and develop and grow and deepen that relationship with God to be able to know more deeply that gift of life, which is Jesus’ promise to us.

Rather like a garden, plants do need space to grow and our lives are often so incredibly busy that for many people prayer is the first thing to go when there are many other demands on our time. But if that does happen, life becomes even more stressful and difficult. So I would like to invite you to reflect on how you can give your life of prayer more space to grow and develop, and to think of particular ways and particular practices that perhaps you can adopt to enable prayer to take root more deeply in your life and that you may bear fruit to God’s glory.

– Br. Geoffrey Tristram

Today’s Question to Journal

What would help you renew your relationship with God?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Garden Plot

Spend time now reflecting on your relationship with God. Use the exercise in your guidebook to map out how your garden is currently growing. Consider too, how you would like it to grow. Respond to the questions in each section with drawings and creative expressions. Start with the soil, move on to the plants, and end with the sky. Have fun, get out your art supplies, and let your creative spirit come alive!

This Week’s Podcast Episode 

Our Relationship with God
– Br. Geoffrey Tristram

It helps to set aside specific times when we’re aware, I’m doing a spiritual practice with a specific intention of cultivating that connection with God. Often unless we set aside a specific time just for that purpose we can forget that our whole life is, in fact, spiritual practice.

I think a great help in that is cultivating the offering of an intention at the beginning of a session of spiritual practice. So whatever the practice is, whether it is one of the literally hundreds of practices that the huge treasury of the church tradition offers us, or something that just makes us feel alive, feel connected with life, we can use that as a spiritual practice by offering an intention before we begin a specific period of doing that as prayer. So we might just say a prayer to God, something like, “As I sit down to do this practice of gardening or writing or yoga or scripture reading, or whatever it happens to be,” we can say, “God, I offer my whole person, my heart, my mind, my whole being to you in this practice and I intend to come to know you and to love you more deeply and to make myself more available to your love through this particular practice.”

– Br. Keith Nelson

Today’s Question to Journal

What spiritual practice might help you grow?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Garden Plot

Spend time now reflecting on your relationship with God. Use the exercise in your guidebook to map out how your garden is currently growing. Consider too, how you would like it to grow. Respond to the questions in each section with drawings and creative expressions. Start with the soil, move on to the plants, and end with the sky. Have fun, get out your art supplies, and let your creative spirit come alive!

This Week’s Podcast Episode 

Our Relationship with God
– Br. Geoffrey Tristram

I have had these moments in life where time seems to just stand still for a second and everything becomes very big and vivid. And I stop and I look around and think, “How in the world did I end up here of all places?” I wanted to be a music teacher and perform music and travel – and being a monk in the greater Boston area was never on my radar and kind of hit me from behind. Yet I am at one of the happiest places I have ever been in my life and I feel very fulfilled and it seems like the shoe fits for me, but yet it is not what I would have ever imagined or planned for myself. And I think that that is something that we often have to think and pray about is sometimes we have to give up some of our own plans in order to have a full or abundant life that God is actually cultivating in us. And so maybe you’ve had that experience where you find yourself in a place where you never thought you would be, living among people or doing a job that you never thought you could possibly do, and yet you feel very fulfilled. And it could be that you are in a place where maybe you are praying about that now and wondering where am I going and this is not what I thought, yet I am on this path now. So what does this mean and where am I going? And that is a perfect place for your prayer and for your relationship to God is to ask God, “What would you have me do now? Where am I going?” And then wait. Wait. In God’s time, you’re going to know. But you have to be patient and you have to wait for that seed to sprout.

– Br. Jim Woodrum

Today’s Question to Journal

What needs to be weeded or cultivated in your soul for you to grow closer to God?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Garden Plot

Spend time now reflecting on your relationship with God. Use the exercise in your guidebook to map out how your garden is currently growing. Consider too, how you would like it to grow. Respond to the questions in each section with drawings and creative expressions. Start with the soil, move on to the plants, and end with the sky. Have fun, get out your art supplies, and let your creative spirit come alive!

This Week’s Podcast Episode 

Our Relationship with God
– Br. Geoffrey Tristram

Nature takes time. There is so much in terms of cycle, seeds are slow to grow, and I so often want things to go quickly or have an expectation of what is possible, what should be possible now. And part of the journey is learning to be patient, learning to slow down, learning to change my expectations of what God is inviting. Sometimes I sense what God is inviting me to and, as my spiritual director told me, it may be something you are living into ten years later, when I am thinking it is going to happen next month, and I keep coming back to that. Maybe this is the thing that yes, I am working towards and maybe I will be there ten years later. What I am doing today is important and it is another step on the journey but I may not see the fruit now. That’s part of the process. I am trying to look to the future and wait for today.

– Br. Luke Ditewig

Today’s Question to Journal

What do you long for in your relationship with God?

This Week’s Workbook Exercise – My Garden Plot

Spend time now reflecting on your relationship with God. Use the exercise in your guidebook to map out how your garden is currently growing. Consider too, how you would like it to grow. Respond to the questions in each section with drawings and creative expressions. Start with the soil, move on to the plants, and end with the sky. Have fun, get out your art supplies, and let your creative spirit come alive!

This Week’s Podcast Episode 

Our Relationship with God
– Br. Geoffrey Tristram