From: Boojeee
Date: Mon Aug 14 12:11:10 MST 2006
Subject: life together

So Karen and I were talking the other day about the monastic tradition of paring cloistered, contemplative nuns who are devoted to prayer with missional nuns who work with the poor and the sick and the children and others in need. On the retreat we talked a bit about this because one of the desert fathers [in Henri Nouwen’s book The Way of the Heart that we were reading] said that he worked to make money to pay for his food and then left some outside his door while he slept and the one who took the money would pray for him while he slept so he could fulfill the command to pray without ceasing. At the time I thought this seemed a bit legalistic in a sort of silly way. Now I’m rethinking the point of that and similar practices of the monastic communities. With the nuns, the idea is that the one who has much time to pray would pray on behalf of those who have more to do in a given day and may not be able to. This isn’t really seen as an “I’ll pray for you” relationship [although there is that], but it’s the idea that a part of the call to unceasing prayer [from 1Thessalonians 5] is taken up by the one for the other so they both fulfill this command. This command is given to the community, not individuals necessarily. The passage is talking about how the community should function together. I think of it like the passage in Philippians 2 that tells us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. [The idea being: work out our salvation together as a body of believers.] Part of the reason that this has been coming up for me is that I’ve recently quit my physically draining [especially for my arthritic body] job at Office Depot to work in a kind of spiritual counseling. With my kids both in school and the plan for me to work less hours than I was at Office Depot, I will have more time to explore the disciplines of silence, solitude and prayer that I’ve been contemplating in Nouwen’s book and another that I’ve been reading called The Sacred Way by Tony Jones. The immediate lie that I hear is that I should feel guilty because it’s not fair that I get this time and most everyone I know doesn’t. My only two options, Satan tells me, are to either find some way to busy myself so it doesn’t look like I’m not doing anything or not tell anyone what I’m experiencing in this because it’s not fair that they can’t have it. Not surprisingly, when I took a day to be alone and talk to God, what I felt like he was saying was that I’m supposed to take this path [i.e. not busy myself] and part of the point is that that’s what I will have to offer to the people around me [i.e. I’m supposed to talk about it]. My ministry is to pray on behalf of my friends who are working full time jobs or are working in the more labor-intensive part of parenting, to speak and write about what I hear God saying to my community, and to be myself a place of rest for the people around me. Speaking even about doing this brings a chorus of lies in my head, I wonder what I’ll hear as I try to live it out. Maybe writing this is a start.

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