Spiritual accompaniment

Transformation in Christ: Representation in Imagery

January 31, 2024

When I saw the iconography shown above – at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s chapel in Seattle – I was drawn to it. Then, drawn back to it again and again. This iconographpy depicts Anastasis: Jesus descending into Hades to retrieve Adam and Eve between his own death on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday. Compelling. I am still coming back to this imagery.

This imagery gets to the heart of Christianity. Christianity is about God’s love for us, God’s grace in our lives, our surrender to allow God to transform us into the people we are meant to be. W are meant to be God’s daughters and sons who live in God’s love and who love one another.

I had already encountered God’s loving grace – starting at an Irish-language mass in 2016 (that story is told here) – and have continued moving through a faith transformation… including when I came across the Anastasis image above. We humans surrendering to God’s transformative grace is redemptive – when we experience this, we then want to grow in faith. As a result of such experience, I am now learning to talk about God’s transformative nature (I’m such an introvert that I’m having to take workshops to “come out of my shell” and more outwardly demonstrate what I’m learning and experiencing).

More recently, I came upon French artist James Tissot’s depiction of Jesus praying alone at night on a mountaintop:

James Tissot's painting of Jesus praying

This image of the illuminated Christ is also compelling. Jesus is shown illumined on a mountain top in prayer, illumined in his relationship with God the father. Further, God transforms us through Christ. God the father transforms us – transforms our faith experience in prayer. This is an image through which I yearn to continue experiencing God’s transformative grace. How can one not want to grow in faith – connect with God’s love for us – when seeing this depiction of Christ illumined in prayer? ”It is in him that we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Prayer gets to the heart of having a faith in we have a relationship with God and allow God to turn us into the people God wants us to be. I wrote more on prayer in my recent monks-in-training post.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Further consideration of “Embodying Forgiveness”

January 26, 2024

I reviewed L. Gregory Jones’ book E mbodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis in early January. The book is important enough to discuss a second time.

Embodying Forgiveness is not a quick read. It’s written rather academically. It is densely packed with important ideas that require thoughtful reading. The book is about a sometimes difficult topic that can take great commitment to apply in one’s life. The book also supports a well-lived faith in which we – as a friend often says – do the “adulting” of living one’s faith (i.e., we grow up and live out the responsibilities we are called to do. In fact, this book helps us “find our inner adult!”). This is the type of book to read when we want to move beyond “easy principles of faith” and fluffy phrases to a faith in which we grow and mature. In other words – it draws us toward meaningful liberation and to living in right relationship with God and the people in our lives. The principles in this book can be intimidating, but that doesn’t mean that the book is a “nonjoyous downer – it’s liberating. In this book, we learn about living for our community rather than being self-centric. We learn about giving up self without being a doormat. Good news: the author draws readers toward practicing forgiveness, making it palatable when forgiveness feel unpalatable.

This book is so important that I’m posting several excerpts (hint: yes, this is an effort to tempt readers to read the book!):

“Forgiveness has long been hard to embody, even among those committed to its importance” (page xi).

“…the craft of forgiveness involves the ongoing and ever deepening process of unlearning sin through forgiveness and learning, through specific habits and practices, to live in communion – with the Triune God, with one another, and with the whole Creation” (page xii).

The ideas in this book move “beyond….pious, sentimental affirmations that ‘Jesus is my friend,'” to friendship being “a much more formative and transformative relationship” (page xiii).

“….forgiveness serves primarily not to absolve guilt but as a reminder, a gracious irritant, of what communion with God and with one another can and should be: and so it should enable and motivate our protest against any situation where people (either ourselves or others) are diminished or destroyed” (page xvi).

“….the purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion, the reconciliation of brokenness” (page 5).

I am the type of reader who thinks that a book worth reading should be read in its’ entirety. In the case of this book, reading even just a chapter or two – and really applying it in one’s life – would move a person forward in a faith well-lived. A worthwhile read!

We can all strive to be monks-in-training!

January 22, 2024

I was recently given a leather-bound journal.

Leather-bound books can bring to mind monks hand-copying books in medieval monasteries (surviving copies of such books sometimes have page border notations such as “it is very cold”). Alternately, we may think of learned scholars in the earliest days of books who wandered from place to place via dirt roads with a leather-bound manuscript in their possession.

We sometimes connect such imagery with thoughts of more spiritual times. ”If I lived in a medieval monastery, I would have been more faith-focused than I am today in a technologically-advanced city in the twenty-first century.” Different times and places each have their own zeitgeist, certainly. And, of course, there are places specifically dedicated to faith pursuits.

We can all be people of faith. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century mystic in Spain, took on reforming the Carmelite religious order (she was a Carmelite nun) to return it to a more religiously-focused character than it had been for a period of time. Just as specifically religious environments can undergo re-invigoration, we can work to make our own lives spiritually vigorous even if we live in a secular environment. A commitment to growing in faith, participating in a faith tradition, daily prayer, making time regularly for activities such as reading faith-focused books and participating in faith-sharing groups, sharing about our faith development efforts (with a friend, a prayer group, a spiritual director, a pastor, etc.), living one’s faith by being of service to others – we can be faith-filled through a combination of all these things.

Daily prayer is a critical component of a faith-filled life. There’s a saying: “There can be no faith without prayer” (source uncertain). Within a theistic vision of faith, a life of faith must involve a relationship with the divine. Our relationships with the people in our lives are defined by relationship: social interactions. This also applies in our faith life – there can be no faith without a relationship with God. Our relationship with God unfolds in two ways – through focused interaction with God (prayer!) and by being of service to God’s children (every human being is a child of God). In the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:14), we read that the apostles – following Jesus’ ascension – “all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”

Not sure how to pray? Not sure how to deepen one’s prayer life? The first thing to know is to pray daily. Relationships aren’t built sporadically – they develop and grow through sustained interaction. Further, relationships are two-way. I like the analogy of comparing prayer to a phone call. We don’t sustain relationships with the people in our lives by phoning someone and saying, “I’m calling to tell you X” – then hanging up. Rather, a phone call is a give-and-take, two-way interaction. Prayer is the same way. We don’t just send our communication to God in a one-way phone call. We both communicate to God in prayer and also rest in stillness to allow God to present to us.

There are many ways to pray:

Talking to God as we would talk to a friend (either verbally or through what’s often called “mental prayer”)
Lectio Divina (a method of praying the scriptures reflectfully)
Attending church services (church is itself a form of prayer)
Religious singing (“Those who sing pray twice”)
Contemplative prayer (for example, learn about this form of prayer through an organization called Contemplative Outreach)

Interested in reading more about prayer? A couple of great books include:

Clinging: The Experience of Prayer (Emilie Griffin)

The Tradition of Catholic Prayer (The Monks of Meinrad Monastery)

Perspectives: how we engage with specific faith concepts

January 17, 2024

Christian writers and denominations variously emphasize different religious ideas. ”Are we justified by faith or by works,” etc…..

In being a person of faith, we don’t get to choose whether the principles of faith are applicable in our lives. Just as we don’t choose whether gravity affects our physical movement or whether we need oxygen to survive, we don’t get to choose whether being faithful is contingent upon growing in “love your neighbor,” whether we should live the ten commandments, if we should develop our prayer lives, etc.

While we don’t get to choose whether truths of faith are applicable in our lives, it’s interesting to ponder how we engage with these ideas. Right now, for example, I’m reading L. Gregory Jones’ book Embodying Forgiveness (an important read!). He states in the book’s early pages that we can only receive God’s grace through learning to forgive (that’s how I read what he said, anyway). Yes, forgiveness is a nonnegotiable, important practice and we receive grace by forgiving others (“forgive us our trespasses as we forgive….”). With that said, I have experienced God’s grace in a situation unrelated to forgiveness (I tell that story here). Just because I’ve experienced God’s loving grace in a situation other than one of forgiveness -seemingly at odds with what I read – doesn’t mean that I don’t accept the need to forgive others in order to be in good relationship with God and with the people around me.

As for the question of whether we are justified by faith or by good works, I accept my denomination’s argument that we are justified by faith. There are people who do good works without being a person of faith – but one cannot be truly faithful without performing good deeds. A faithful life calls us to care for other people (i.e., “faith without works is dead”).

Some faith precepts “get our attention” at different times in our lives (and in different ways). That’s okay. Engaging with the faith principles that reach us at any given time will lead us in “continuous conversion.” “The first work of the Holy Spirit is conversion. Moved by grace, man turns towards God…..(CCC#1989).” As long as we are engaged in growing in faith – with a healthy level of discipline – we are moving forward (I am drawn to the idea of continuous conversion!). What matters most – I think – is that we allow God to direct us in the direction(s) God wants us to go. When dry periods in our faith experience come along – and they do – we must simply continue trying to grow in faith. Even John of the Cross (my second-favorite mystic, after Teresa of Avila with whom he worked) wrote of seemingly dry periods (he said to continuing praying even when prayer seems dry – or dark; he rightly said that we’ll see afterward that God has worked within us during dry/dark periods of prayer, even if we didn’t see it at the time).

List: examples of faith being hard work, path to joy

January 12, 2024

Living Christianity is both hard work and a path to joy and freedom.

Examples of having to work at living Christianity include:

“It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24). Putting faith into practice – such as giving up our attachment to worldly goods – is a challenge.
The bumper sticker “Love your neighbor means everybody” (a reflection on Matthew 22: 34-40: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself.”) speaks to the heart of Christianity and of the Christian faith being hard work. It’s easy to love the people we like. It’s harder to love people who we are naturally inclined to dislike (the disheveled homeless person who went through our trash and left a mess, a political figure we disagree with, the difficult relative, an argumentative person at work, etc.). Yet, “love your neighbor” does mean “everybody” – we don’t get to pick and choose. Many or all aspects of living the Christian faith are required to practice treating everyone with dignity and grace. Loving people is a verb – a self-giving action. If we were all to practice this well (hard work!), the world would be a better place.
The pastor and writer L. Gregory Jones writes (in his book Embodying Forgiveness) ““Christian forgiveness involves a high cost, both for God and for those who embody it. It requires the disciplines of dying and rising with Christ, disciplines for which there are no shortcuts, no handy techniques to replace the risk and vulnerability of giving up ‘possession’ of one’s self, which is done through the practices of forgiveness and repentance.” Yes, there is a ‘high cost’ to doing forgiveness – but also high rewards.

While there are plenty of examples of how living one’s faith is a lifelong effort (an “ongoing conversion,” in challenging ways such as those noted above), there are also joys:

“And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus (Phillipians 4:7).”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Matthew 5:6).”
Living faith principles – including surrender to allowing God to transform us – turns us into the people God intends for us to be. God wants us to be happy and will – if we allow it – adjust who we are to that purpose.
In living out the principles of faith, we contribute positively to our communities – helping to make the world a better place.
Living faith principles teaches us to bring joy into the lives of other people – which is among the primary reasons for us to be alive. We are all God’s children; bringing joy into the lives of God’s children is a wonderful thing!

The Christian path is a great, joyous path. A loving path that turns us into better people.

Loving God (Reflection, part two: Matthew 22:34-40)

January 6, 2024

I frequently quote Matthew 22: 34-40: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself.” In a recent post, I focused on the aspect of loving one’s neighbors (“love your neighbor means loving everybody”).

As mentioned in that recent blog post, there’s a lot that goes into living each aspect of love God, love your neighbor, love yourself.

For the aspect of loving God, loving God necessitates investing time and effort into a continuing relationship with God.

A crucial aspect of faith gets to “the heart” of a loving relationship with God: God is love, God loves us, and God wants to have a relationship with us. It is God’s very nature to love. Given that it is God’s inherent nature to love, the Catholic Catechism speaks to God’s nature needing to be Trinitarian – Father, Son, Holy Ghost – because God needed someone to love before God had humans to love; the three aspects of the Trinity could love each other – each aspect of itself – until we humans came along….and, of course, the Trinity continues loving each aspect of itself. Paragraph 221 of the Catechism reads: “God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.”).

Us loving God in response to God’s love for us requires intentionality on our part. A relationship with God happens in prayer. There can be no faith without prayer (I don’t recall where I first heard this. It’s true!). Westerners live in an activity-focused society; sitting in communal presence with God (prayer!) – as well as with the people in our lives – requires the willingness to pause contemplatively. Pausing contemplatively can be uncomfortable for those unfamiliar with the practice – forcing presence with inner experience that is sometimes avoided. The fruit of being present with God can bring us to the joy of loving God and experiencing being loved by God.

I have heard prayer compared to a phone call. We wouldn’t phone someone and say, “I’m calling to tell you about X. Here’s what I have to say,” then hang up, ending the call. It’s the same way with prayer. Too often, prayer is thought to be one way – us talking to God. Remember to listen (“resting in God’s presence”). Prayer is a two-way communication – us communicating to God and – for many of us – allowing God to be present with us (a few saints sense direct verbal communication!). Be still and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10).

Loving God is one of the aspects of how we are meant to live. Living in right relationship with God – loving God – turns out to be its’ own reward, bring joy to both God and to ourselves.

Loving God also requires loving our neighbor. Because each of us is a child of God, loving God inherently requires loving God’s children. “If someone says, ‘I love God,; and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 John 4:20).” To whatever degree we live “love all of God’s children,” we contribute to making this world a better place.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a “Content Creator/Individual” member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: Embodying Forgiveness

January 5, 2024

This book, Embodying Forgiveness by Methodist pastor L. Gregory Jones, makes forgiveness more possible by demonstrating its’ theological necessity. Therefore, this is an important grow-my-faith book for individuals committed to truly living their faith. The book challenges readers to grow in ways that can be uncomfortable (growth that’s challenging to achieve can move us with particular stride along the long-haul journey of genuine maturing in faith).

This is a book that must be read slowly. The concepts presented grab a reader’s attention such that one must pause to take in the book’s ideas, find the emotional capacity to live each aspect of the book’s insights.

Sample excerpts include:

“….people are mistaken if they think of Christian forgiveness primarily as absolution from guilt. The purpose of forgiveness is the restoration of communion [between parties] (page five).”
“Christian forgiveness involves a high cost, both for God and for those who embody it. It requires the disciplines of dying and rising with Christ, disciplines for which there are no shortcuts, no handy techniques to replace the risk and vulnerability of giving up ‘possession’ of one’s self, which is done through the practices of forgiveness and repentance. This does not involve self-denial, nor the ‘death’ of self through annihilation. Rather, it is learning to see oneself and one’s life in the context of communion [i.e., community] (pages 5-6).”

A worthwhile read!

Caring for others, appreciating their care for us

January 2, 2024

Matthew 22: 34-40 is frequently quoted in this blog: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

There’s a lot that goes into living each aspect of love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. Loving God involves investing time and effort into a continuing relationship with God. Loving our neighbors requires getting out of ourselves to care for others in a myriad of ways, large and small. Loving others “as we love ourselves” requires that we live lovingly within ourselves (and to live by faith’s principles – including moving away from behavior that causes any trouble, even for ourselves).

How well do we put into practice loving other people? How well we care for other people is, surely, one of the greatest measures of how well we live our faith. So many aspects to being mindfully of other people’s welfare.

There’s a wonderful bumper sticker that says “Love your neighbor means everybody.” Fully living that bumper sticker requires bringing everything we learn in faith to the table. Truly being centered on kindness, thoughtfulness, caring, generosity, and unselfishness – in other words, focusing on loving the people around us – is what faith principles move us toward being. Christ said in Matthew 22:34-40, “All the Law and the demands of the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Robert Hayden’s haunting poem Those Winter Sundays speaks both to quiet love-in-action and to the pain of not acknowledging receipt of love-in-action. Taking in this thoughtfully observant poem requires action on our part – coming to more fully appreciate the people who care for us (and to say so!) as well as prompting us to better care for the people around us. Caring for others is so often done quietly!

Those Winter Sundays

By Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires ablaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake up and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

when the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Faith: grasping toward knowing God

December 27, 2023

How well do we know and describe God? Individuals sometimes express frustration at the imperfections of how faith traditions talk about God (sometimes, people view religion negatively as a result). It was pointed out to me that our human attempts to communicate about God “merely reflect our human efforts that hint around various aspects of the contours of who God is.” Our communication about God is partial and imperfect and should be recognized as our limited human efforts to know the divine – an effort to appreciate for what we do learn rather than an imperfection to criticize.

This idea of the scope of our incomplete perceptions hit home – from a surprising perspective – while visiting with my mother on Christmas day. Parents and children think that they know one another. Children of blind parents think they have a close grasp of their parents’ experience. Blind parents – like all parents – think that they know their own children. Hmmm….. My mother knew that I had blonde hair when I was a young child (I was born blonde)….. Well, fast forward to the present day….. When I showed up at my mother’s house this November for the Thanksgiving holiday, I chose not to tell her that I’d had my hair cut short after having long hair for many years (I hadn’t fully made peace with my new hair style). My mother learned of my haircut when one of my siblings commented on my haircut (a few years ago, my mother found out about that sibling’s tattoo when I commented on the tattoo!). Later that Thanksgiving evening (after I’d gone home), my sibling told my mother “that Kim’s hair looks darker now that it’s short” – my sibling suggested that I had perhaps dyed my hair….. A month later, on Christmas Day, my mother asked if I had dyed my hair when I got it cut this summer. ”No,” I said, “My hair is naturally brown. When my hair is longer, the summer sun has time to bleach some of the longer strands to blonde. Now that it’s short, all that’s visible is my hair’s natural brown color. (awkward pause…..) ”Hmmm, my hair has been brown since early childhood…..” This generated an awkward moment – my mother was puzzled, I was surprised. I realized later (while driving home) that when I was ages four and five, when my hair naturally changed from blonde to brown, no one thought to tell my mother that the color of my hair had changed. Her parents, her grandparents, her siblings, my father, her friends – no one told her that her oldest child’s hair had changed from blonde to brown (it also didn’t occur to me as a child to tell my mother that the color of my hair had changed). I’ve now had naturally brown hair (with streaks of summer blonde) for most of my life; my mother thought for all these years that her daughter was still blonde! It came as a shock for my mother to find out that she’d been uninformed all these years about such a basic thing as the color of her her child’s hair; it came as a shock to me to find out that my own mother has thought all these years that I’m still blonde!

Transfer this Christmas Day conversation to our human efforts to know – and to communicate about – the nature of God. Ultimately, we humans are going to know as much about God as God reveals to us – finite amounts. We communicate about God to the degree that we know about God. What matters most regarding our knowledge of God is to know that God loves us and that God wants us to love both God and each other. We don’t need to fully understand God to positively live lives of faith.

This Sunday: Fourth Sunday of Advent

December 21, 2023

This Sunday – Dec. 24th – is the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It is also Christmas Eve (and, three days after today, the darkest day in the Northern Hemisphere – a time to bring light into the world). This Sunday, we light all four candles on our Advent wreaths.

Advent is a time for us to reflect upon, engage in, and renew our faith.

Four topics associated with Advent (i.e., faith-renewing reflections) are hope, peace, joy, and love. Last week, I reflected broadly on these four topics in a blog post that can be viewed here. This week, I reflect on these same topics, but in such a way to challenge each of us to personally and meaningfully engage with these topics:

Hope: What can you do this week to bring hope into someone’s life? When I volunteered in the prison system, I co-led a study about people who successfully “left-crime-behind” following incarceration. 100% of the formerly-incarcerated people we interviewed who “left crime behind” after incarceration reported having someone in their life who made a difference in their life, a person who helped them change their lives change for the better (made time for them). What tangible form of support can you provide for someone you know who is experiencing a challenge in their life? Spend time with them? Help them navigate a challenging situation?
Peace: What can you do this week to contribute to peace in the world? Contribute $$ to a charity that provides civilian relief in war zones? Start volunteering at a local charity that serves challenged individuals (like volunteering at a local jail)? Be the person “who gets off the merry-go-round” in a situation of endless and/or senseless discord (i.e., workplace disagreements, family disputes, etc.) and “take the high road” to support another person in that situation? As indicated in last week’s post, peace is the result of sacrificial love – Christ’s sacrificial love for us and our sacrificial love for other people.
Joy: Be the joy in someone’s life this holiday season. Drop off a surprise holiday gift, do someone’s task for them at work, bring Christmas cookies to the office, go Christmas caroling…… We can all find something to do to bring some joy into someone’s life!
Love: Who can you bring some “loving care?” When Jesus was asked which of the commandments is greatest, he said “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’” (Matthew 22: 34-40). It’s easy to love the people we like and with whom we enjoy spending time. It matters just as much that we bring love to the people who might seem harder to love – a relative or friend who is in a time of need (we’re busy!), the irritable relative, the difficult co-worker we’d rather not work with, the homeless person who perennially displays challenging behavior outside the grocery store, the socially-isolated person we know who doesn’t seem to be able to connect with the people around them…. Loving someone involves a time commitment – time well spent!

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a “Content Creator/Individual” member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog post, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Accompanying you in your faith journey