Centered, Calm, Stable 07-28-2016

My profession as pastor of a progressive church is demanding, to put it mildly. My vitality depends on daily, weekly, and yearly Sabbath time. My daily Sabbath is to use half of my lunch hour for centering prayer. My weekly Sabbath is setting aside a half day a week for prayer, reflection, reading, and writing. And my yearly Sabbath is a six to ten day Centering Prayer retreat. We all need daily, weekly, and yearly Sabbath time to recharge.

What Sabbath time teaches is we’re more important than what we do. We’re primarily human beings, not human doings. Are we a prayerful presence when things get stressful or are we bouncing off the walls like those around us? Are we a calming presence or an anxious one? We gravitate toward people who keep a sense of internal poise, who stay calm in the midst of life’s storms. Centered people of faith inspire—people who are stable and anchored. Many minds are swept to sea when life gets unmanageable. We need rooted, grounded presence.

Christians don’t make disciples by evangelism and charity alone. They make disciples by the quality of their being—by the quality of their presence. “Are we centered?” “Are we calm?” “Are we stable?” “Are we always running around (often with little awareness) or do we have a sense of Sabbath?”[1]

[1] It’s possible to maintain “a sense of Sabbath” even in the midst of a very hectic life, yet this is the graduate course in “a sense of Sabbath.” First we simply need to slow down.
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David Frenette’s book The Path of Centering Prayer reenergized the Centering Prayer tradition with its fresh insights and teachings.  Centering Prayer Meditations: Effortless Contemplation to Deepen Your Experience of God is a wonderful companion audio program  created to be equally rewarding as a stand-alone guide – gives listeners an immersive resource to learn contemplative prayer, step by step and in the moment. With clarity and compassionate presence, Frenette explains the essential principles of this contemplative practice for both new and seasoned practitioners, and then guides us experientially through core prayers and meditations.

How do we know that Jesus was actually raised from the dead in bodily form? This course with Prof. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, examines the extraordinary claim that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead in a bodily fashion to appear in person to people after his cruel death, crucifixion, and entombment.

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