Pioneering Old Paths
You need somewhere to ponder, wonder, wrestle.
You're curious - perplexed - even listless - about the paradoxes of life in Christ: the pains, promises, people, and practices.
You're in the right place.
Join Amy Leigh Bamberg, a spiritual director who deeply values the sacred work of holy listening with individuals, couples, and groups in exploration of the intricate ways God meets each person. Tune in for in-depth discussions with insightful guests and find companionship for your spiritual transformation journey.
Pioneering Old Paths
Contemplative Prayer: A Striking Metaphor
Sporting Rainbow Brite pj's, as a child I curled underneath the covers and dutifully repeated: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."
Bowing my head before all meals, I listened as my dad ritually delivered: "Lord, make us thankful, for these and all our many blessings. Amen."
Being a Bible-belted suhthuhnuh, I memorized The Lord's Prayer and readily spouted it at funerals and football games.
Traipsing fervently through my 20's and 30's, I learned to pray with greater personality (for me, intensity). I'd pray down walls--you know, tear down those obstacles looming before me like that wall in Jericho. I'd work feverishly to pray "the right way": asking nicely yet vigorously while following patterns like the Tabernacle Prayer and The Prayer of Jabez.
What false bravado: bossing God around and calling it Christianity.
What blindness: unable to recognize that in my truest self. I was petrified of God. Like others in this stage of spiritual formation, I joined the delusional dance of name-it-claim-it "faith" and followed its pulsating rhythms of blame-others-shame-self.
What belligerence: using prayers for power-control plays. I spent years self-protecting, self-promoting, and self-projecting and calling it godliness. I spent years worshipping a god conjured by my own frenetic soul, a figment of my blighted imagination who kept me chronically agitated and insecure and hiding.
Like others, my journey into a quieter and more stilled posture of prayer has been arduous. Layered. Awkward. Liberating. Along the way, as I encounter incredible folks like Saint Teresa of Avila and tenuously open the invitations of Christ, I can explore and expand true faith through the intimate context of contemplative prayer.
In this episode, Terry Lamb and I unpack a bit more of Teresa's understanding of prayer and the spiritual life, discussing her metaphor of a garden receiving water. Here are a few resources for the journey:
- Recollection - gathering together one's thoughts, affections, attentions, and will and surrendering them into a comprehensive concentration on the presence of God. [Helpful external source for reference rather than endorsement of blog author.]
- Teresa of Avila: The Book of My Life
- Detachment, defined and cited
- The Carmelite Religious Order
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