Seasons of Our Prayer

Getting back into a rhythm is a difficult thing. When I wrote frequently for our blog last year, the process of sitting down to put thoughts to paper was routine, familiar, and often easy. I developed a liturgy that suited me well and allowed writing to be a prayerful exercise. Yet, after a five-month hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I find myself struggling to make my fingers type. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but rather that the time away has dulled the familiarity of the liturgy. What was once a discipline of stillness to center my thoughts and prayers well enough to write has become once more a laborious struggle to remember how to be still. It’s much easier to let other things take away my time, and I find myself making excuses that other things are more important than this more cumbersome task at hand. It feels like I’m starting over.

Christian Life, Spiritual DisciplinesRachael CrewsOctober 26, 2024seasons, ordinary season, rule, rule of life

What’s the Point of the Artist’s Self-Death?

We’ve considered the necessity of self-death through Christ in the life of the Christian artist. What’s next? What is the point of this self-death? Where does it go? Does my story, my particular identity, matter at all in my artistic practice?

Prayer, Christian Life, Spiritual DisciplinesAlea PeisterJune 22, 2024art, death, sacrifice

The Rosary: Obtaining Its Promises

The Rosary is a longtime church tradition. It began in the 9th century in various forms, until it was revealed to St. Dominic in 1221 A.D. by Mother Mary herself. From then on, through his religious order of the Dominicans, the Rosary was promoted and encouraged for all Christians.

Losing the Way

Since last year, Timothy Lawrence and I adopted the tradition to read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy throughout the Lenten fast. This reading course was outlined by Fr. Hayden a few years prior for his students at Pacifica. As if enduring the silence and temptations of Lent are not enough, adding a medieval poetry epic about the 9 circles of hell, 7 levels of purgatory, and 9 spheres of heaven to that is a good penance. During the first few chapters, there is an emphasis on losing the way. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Lent reveals much about ourselves. Our fears. Our worries. Our anxiety.

Sunday is Non-Transferable

It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead.

Before the Silence

“In December 2016, I watched one of the most emotionally intense and scarring movies of my life on the big screen that had me questioning parts of my faith. This movie was Silence, written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Based on the novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence follows two Jesuit Priests, Fr. Rodrigues, and Fr. Garupe, leaving their home in Portugal to bring the Gospel to Japan and to discover the whereabouts of a well-known Priest who committed apostasy. Throughout the film, the themes of silence, despair, and hope appear and reappear. The scene that never left my mind was one during one of Fr. Rodrigues’ prayers.”

Crossing Life's Thresholds

In storytelling, crossing the threshold is essential for character development. It is the protagonist saying “yes” to the journey ahead as they leave their comfort zones to venture off into the unknown, unsure of what is out there or who they will meet. As Bilbo Baggins himself puts it in this same scene from the Fellowship of the RIng, “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Obstacles to Prayer

Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray:

Only With Claws

In his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove.

Why Making Matters

We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.

An Objective Offering

We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?

The Creative Act

In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?

Acedia

In this series of posts, we will consider the vice of ‘sloth,’ one of the more misunderstood among the vices. Before we focus on this vice in particular, though, we do well to look at what place the categories of the ‘seven (or eight) deadly (or capital) vices’ have in the Christian life. These are not a list found in the Scriptures–they do not have the same evident clarity as the Ten Commandments, the Summary of the Law, or the Beatitudes. Nevertheless, this list emerged immediately after the great persecutions ended and Christians began to have time and space (and longevity) to study and explain methodically the spiritual work of the Christian life.

Christian Life, Prayer, Spiritual DisciplinesFr. Hayden ButlerSeptember 9, 2023acedia, sloth, deadly sins, temptation, prayer

Here I Go Again

Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, and I can’t help but hear in my head the rock n’ roll classic hit, “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake. Don’t mock me–it will forever and always be a rock and roll classic that will survive the ages and instantly bring me joy when I hear it. Just in case you’re not a regular listener of the “80’s on 8” Sirius XMU channel, to refresh your memory, the song opens with these lyrics: