experimenting with prayer beads

One of my spiritual goals this year concerns getting a tool that will help me cultivate my practice of prayer. Having children has (news flash!) changed the rhythms of my day and my prayer practice is not what it once was (rise early, 30 minute run, shower, pray – read bible – read spiritual book).

Yes, I’m a pastor. So, you know, either judge me or laud me for my transparency/authenticity but it isn’t so easy to practice the contemplative life of prayer I once enjoyed B.C.E. (Before Children Era. Incidentally, a favorite quote, reportedly from an actual seminarian: “the most important quality in preaching is authenticity and if you can learn to fake that you’ve got it made!” But I digress; back to the point at hand…). Well, I’ve tried lots, but I’m coming back to the idea of prayer beads as some sort as a practical tool that might help me out.

Here’s the idea: A bracelet (you know, church camp style…) with a bead for each prayer or Scripture or type/element of prayer to engage in. I listed stuff I wanted beads for and narrowed it down to fifteen beads. I have discovered that I am helped by prescribed elements and prompts for spontaneous prayer. The mixture is important. And having a prescribed element, like Psalm 23 or the Lord’s Prayer, gives me something I can pray through slowly or simply recite depending on where I am each day. Prescribed elements help center me, focus my mind and heart, and allow me the freedom to offer the spontaneous prayers of the day/hour.

So, without further adieu, here’s my list. There are five categories (they emerged after I had my list of elements and saw how they would fit together for my practice) and then elements for each bead listed underneath.

• Centering
  • Psalm 23
  • Breath prayers – various. May be the common “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner” (the “Jesus Prayer”) or some other typically Scripture-based short phrase suitable for the breath prayer practice.
• Grounding
  • The Apostles’ Creed
  • The Nicene Creed
  • The Ten Commandments
  • The Great Commandment
  • The Great Commission
• Asking
  • The Lord’s Prayer
  • The “Prayers of the People” – a progression for prayer petitions: family, friends, local church, community, world (including need for justice and the leaders of the nations). You get the idea.
• Calling
  • The Wesleyan Covenant Prayer
  • A Baptismal Prayer for Discipleship – based on the prayer of blessing over the baptized person (“Heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit work within me this day, that I may be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Amen.”).
  • A Eucharistic Prayer for Mission/Ministry – based on the prayer after receiving at the end of the celebration of communion. (“We give you thanks for this Holy Mystery in which you have given yourself to us. Grant that we may go forth in the strength of your steadfast love to give ourselves for others. Amen.”)
• Sending
  • The Gloria Patri
  • The Doxology
  • Trinitarian benediction – like breath prayers, drawn from Scripture

What aids to prayer and practices have you found helpful in your life? Have you had any experience with using prayer beads?

personal goals for 2010

Yes, I’m one of those folks who likes to set goals. I wish I were one of those folks who were excellent and disciplined in executing and accomplishing his goals more consistently. When I think about it, I fail to reach my goals either a lapse in personal discipline, an overly ambitious pie-in-the-sky goal, or a combination of these two. One of the lessons I’m learning from this is the importance of self-knowledge.

Accomplishing a goal is just about always a combination of focus, discipline, and hard work. But these elements all speak to the execution side of goals. At least as important, it seems to me more and more, is the setting side of goals: What am I really interested in accomplishing? What truly resonates with me as worthwhile? What goals represent a natural extension of who I am? On that last one, some goals may represent me being the me I’d like to be, but there’s still an unnameable “it” quality to goals that “fit” and seem to be natural extensions of who I really am that is different from ones that are too “out there” and, though interesting and perhaps even praise-worthy, don’t really resonate with my soul. So self-knowledge is important.

This year I am following a couple of rules: (1) have a relatively short list of “SMART” goals, (2) have someone with whom I am accountable, (3) set quarterly benchmarks and action items that help me “eat the elephant one bite at a time.”

That last one is critical and comes from my friend with whom I am sharing accountability. A mentor of his is big on thinking in terms of quarters for goals. So we are integrating this into both personal and professional goals.

So, here are most of my personal goals. This year, I used these headings/categories for my personal goals: heart, mind, soul, strength. Heart is relationship-related goals. Mind is intellectual/learning goals. Learning is one of my hobbies, truth be told, so this makes plenty of sense for me. Soul is my relationship with God. Strength is my health/fitness.

• Heart
  • I’ll not get into those specifically here, but I’ve got a practice for each relational sphere (spouse, kids, family of origin, friends) to attend to this year in order to nurture my relationships.
• Mind
  • Read 45 books
  • Write 100 blog posts (average of 2/week)
  • Finish a book manuscript
  • Rationale: I love to read and enjoy pressing myself to read more and learn more through reading. I finished 37 books in 2009, a high for me, so I thought I’d push it a little further. As for the two writing goals, there are two motivations. First, writing helps me work out my thinking. If you can articulate what you think well, you’ve had to think through it more thoroughly and clearly. I can use that. Second, I’d like to improve as a writer and to do that I need to write, not imagine writing.
• Soul
  • Read the whole Bible in 2010
  • Make a practical tool to help me practice “praying continually”
  • Rationale: These are two “results-oriented” goals that together can help me go deeper and get more consistent in my devotional practice. Plus, I need to keep it simple these days. Balancing work and family is a contact sport for anyone, not just wanna-be contemplatives. Don’t want to dumb-down spirituality, but need to keep it earthy at the same time. Besides, bathing kids, doing chores, and hanging with the wife are the stuff of prayer as well.
• Strength
  • Run the Houston half-marathon in January 2011
  • Rationale: Before I had kids I really enjoying running — for exercise, for clearing my head, for praying, etc. It’s been a while, but we’re done making new babies (just going to work with the ones we’ve got from here out) and they’re growing a little, which means that re-introducing some exercise habits is more realistic at this point. And this goal drags behind it other things I’d like to do like lose a few pounds and get a little more discipline, both of which and more happen when I run regularly.

What personal goals do you have for 2010?

eucharist (-ist… -ist…) in (in… in…) spaaaace…….

Saw a brief post on my friend JD’s blog about Buzz Aldrin’s account of celebrating the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, on the moon. Check it out here.

A longer account of things is here.

"Love is itself a form of knowlege"

The above is a translation of Gregory the Great writing in Latin at the end of the 6th century: “Amor ipse notitia est.”

A few more great quotations from the last chapter of The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Wilken:

“Maximus [the Confessor] loved paradoxical phrases and oxymorons… He was searching for a vocabulary to say what the psalmist meant with ‘seek the face of the Lord always,’ that the soul that loves God is at rest in God yet at the same time in restless movement toward God.”

“The Christian intellectual tradition is an exercise in thinking about the God who is known and seeing the One who is loved.”

“Christian thinking, like all thinking, requires questioning, reflection, interpretation, argument. But reason has short wings. Without love it is tethered to the earth.”

Jesus’ spiritual disciplines & the ethics of consumption

In reading Matthew 6, I noticed Jesus’ commentary on three “spiritual disciplines” that were apparently in current practice (though not necessarily well): giving, praying, and fasting. It seems to me that consumerism is the number one spiritual issue with the vast majority of the American church, as well as the American culture. While Jesus said to “Go and make disciples of all nations,” the American culture says to “Go and make consumers of all nations.” Who’s doing a better job at their commission, the church or the culture?

There are two levels to explore, the disciplines themselves and the spirit in which we practice them. The disciplines that Jesus highlights in his commentary (plunked in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount) address our modern consumerism. Give: Rather than consume resources, share with others. Pray: Rather than consume religion and spirituality, submit oneself to God. Fast: Rather than consume according to our demanding appetites, rely on God’s power and grace to master ungodly and unbalanced appetites. Further, the spirit with which we are to practice our acts of devotion to God is one of humility. Who is our audience? This is the aspect of our devotion that elevates the issue of consumerism. To use our acts of devotion to God as a means to consume approval and admiration from others is the most dastardly brand of consumption of all.

Perhaps this is why Jesus followed his commentary on the proper practice of spiritual devotion with a teaching about our treasures: “but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:20-21).

Which commission is revealed to be more privileged in my practice: Jesus’ Great Commission or American culture’s commission? The difference may lie in my giving, praying and fasting.