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    Mar 01, 2020

    Reaching Out

    Reaching Out

    Passage: Psalms 139:7-12

    Speaker: Rev. Vivian McCarthy, Pastor

    When Jesus asks us to take up our cross and follow him (Mark 8:34) we are invited to reach out far beyond our broken and sinful condition and give shape to a life that intimates the great things that are prepared for us. ~Henri Nouwen

    I must tell you that when I read the first chapter of Nouwen’s book, I was tempted to find other inspiration. Nouwen wrote of the challenges in writing and said something like: sometimes when I sit down to write, there’s nothing, and I find myself seeking others’ words rather than drawing from my own well of spiritual experience. He implied that he didn’t always want to dig that deep.

    It struck too close to home.

    Life is busy. My schedule often turns on a dime – changing from moment to moment – and maybe I like that a little too much. If I need to respond to an ever-changing list of things that need to be done, it saves me from having to look or listen too closely for that still, small voice or examine why I am not present to God.

    Nouwen’s approach may seem directly opposite our understanding of the spiritual life. We even have a Women’s Circle whose name is opposite his book’s “order,” if you will. We often – maybe usually – talk about God being first, others second, and us last. Nouwen says that if we don’t deal with ourselves first, truly examining what is capturing our attention, there is no room for God or for others. We will constantly fill our thoughts and our time with other things, avoiding the very internal conversation that is essential to our being able to truly connect with others and with God.

    So, as we enter the Lenten season together, I have a question for you – and this one is not one that I am asking you to answer right now but to ponder over these next few weeks: where are you in your spiritual development – in your spiritual journey?

    I had an uncle who was very important to me. He lived next door when I was a little girl – oh he wasn’t my uncle at that time – that came several years later. What I learned later in life was that he believed that since he had had an experience that he called being saved, he didn’t have any further spiritual work to do. He was forever after a fully formed disciple of Jesus. Nothing else was necessary – no more Bible study, no need to go to church or have spiritual conversations. All done!

    How do you see your own spiritual life? Have you “graduated?” Are you fully formed just as you are? Do you have a kind of scope and sequence chart of achievement that measures where you stand in the Kingdom of God? Do you consider coming to church on Sunday as the measure of your accomplishment as a disciple?

    There are several dangers to that kind of thinking, and I believe that chief among those dangers is that if we feel we have achieved a certain level of saintliness, that thinking could lead us to a damaging self-righteousness – damaging to our own spiritual journey and damaging to anyone else who may see us as models of spiritual growth.

    Of his own spiritual journey, Nouwen wrote:

    When after many years of adult life I ask myself, “Where am I as a Christian?” there are just as many reasons for pessimism as for optimism. Many of the real struggles of twenty years ago are still very much alive. I am still searching for inner peace, for creative relationships with others, and for the experience of God, and neither I nor anyone else has any way of knowing if the small psychological changes during the past years have made me a more or a less spiritual man.

    Spiritual growth isn’t as linear nor as simple as many of us seem to think. If you think of your spiritual life like this,  

    many of us just might agree with you – especially if you think that’s the way it should be. After all, as Westerners, we tend to think that things should proceed in an orderly manner, moving in a progressively upward direction.

    I don’t know too many people who become perfect Christians, much less whose spiritual life is that orderly. Mine certainly isn’t!

    It’s more like this 

     

     

     

    or THIS

    Over the next 3 Sundays we are going to walk through the 3 sections of Nouwen’s book, and rather than my explaining it to you, my hope is to provide you with some spiritual experiences that will allow you to explore your own spiritual journey as we seek to move through the 3 Movements of the Spiritual Life, as Nouwen calls them: 

          From Loneliness to Solitude

          From Hostility to Hospitality

          From Illusion to Prayer

    Don’t worry – I’m not planning to make you talk to each other. This is interior work, and  I will be praying for you as we undertake it.