Learning to Walk in the Dark

Learning to walk in the Dark BBT

“Our light bulbs have burned out and the fixtures are hanging from the ceiling by a bare wire. Before we get more artificial light, see if there is a message in the dark. God has done some of his best work in the dark, including resurrection.” Barbara Brown Taylor, Festival of Homiletics Nashville 2013, from Learning to walk in the Dark.

As I have mentioned, I have learned so much from Barbara Brown Taylor. I read her first book of sermons on the gospel of Matthew, The Seeds of Heaven, in a book group in the 1980’s at St. Mark's that met at their bookstore, The Bookmark.  I was magnetized by her use of words and her intimate gospel message. She taught me how to be a narrative preacher, seeing God in the stories of the Bible and how these stories are true in our lives. For years, I have gone to every conference she led about preaching and writing, especially at the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral and Kanuga. I have read almost everything she has published that I could get my hands on. In recent years, she has taught me about seeing God in the world, pluralism, seeing God in people of other faiths, seeing God in the dark. Finally, she has taught me to be me, not a Barbara Brown Taylor copy but to find my own voice and be the person God has created me to be. This is our job as spiritual friends, to help each other become the person God created us to be, not what we think our parents or children or spouse want us to be, not even to be the person we most admire. However, a person we admire may give us a clue about some of the qualities that may be hidden in us that are a part of the person God created us to be, and we daily thank them for it.

Joanna   joannaseibert.com

celtic spirituality

Celtic Spirituality: Celtic sacred life of hospitality in community

    “I sought my God;

    My God I could not see.

    I sought my soul

    My soul eluded me.

    I sought my brother

    And I found all three.”

In the tradition of Celtic hospitality, God is not only present in Nature but also in our neighbor, in ourselves, and especially in the stranger. This is a sacredness in relationships. I am told there is no word in the Irish language for private property. Faith is lived in community with a combination of periodic seclusion and community and mission. Anamchara or soul friends or spiritual friends or spiritual directors are important relationships. Women are regarded as equals and communities are not hierarchical. Monasteries rather than parishes are the basis of the church. The Celts value education, art and music.

We made a trip to Iona off the western coast of Scotland twice and would go back again in a heartbeat. You really do have to want to go there, though, going by ferry, down a one lane winding road, and finally walking over on a ferry onto the small, three-mile-long island in the Inner Hebrides where Columba brought Celtic Christianity to England in 563. This is where the breathtaking illuminated manuscripts of The Book of Kells are believed to have begun to be written at the end of the 8th century.  Iona is believed to be an especially “thin” space where the membrane between the spiritual and the secular is extremely thin. This was our experience as well. You walk a lot, eat good food, worship outdoors and in the ancient abbey and in a decaying nunnery, listen to the wind and waves, study high crosses, wear warm clothing and watch the sea change the color of the 2,000 million-year-old rocks by the shoreline.

I often meet with spiritual friends who describe what is Celtic Spirituality when they have no name for it. This seems to be a sign of the universality of this type of spirituality.

Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction

John Miriam Jones, With an Eagle’s Eye

Joanna    joannaseibert.com

Evil disguised as good

“Evil only succeeds by disguising itself as good.” Thomas Acquinas

Richard Rohr recently ended one of his daily blogs with this statement which took my breath away. How often am I blindsided by thinking I am doing the right thing when it is really the wrong thing. I have learned one clue. When I am so certain that something is right, I am to beware. I must go slowly. I may be on the wrong path. When I am immediately incensed about an issue and want to lash out, this is when evil takes over a good cause.

My husband and I have been watching Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. This story is chocked full of people doing evil disguised as good as probably all wars are.

Every day I see kind, generous people trying to help and save addicts and alcoholics they love when they are not helping them by supporting them and allowing them to stay in their addiction. The denial for those caught in addiction that they do not have a problem also is evil disguised as good.

The church has disguised evil as good in its many abuses to people who are different from it from its very beginning from Jews and Muslims to the Inquisitions to colonial times and slavery, to missionaries to the countries of Africa, to today’s wrestlings with the issues of women, gays, LGBT’s, and immigrants.

Parents also struggle with the issue of evil disguised as good as they are constantly confronted with the issues of whether what they are doing for their children is helping them become the people God created them to be or is their care giving keeping their children from growing, maturing. They have only their own experience with their own parents which may not be helpful, and it is tempting to over react to that part of their history.

The answer seems to be awareness, awareness of who we are and what makes us act the way we do. The answer is staying connected to the God of our understanding and learning to respond to those nudges or coincidences that put us on that road less traveled. The answer is living intentionally in community where we are supported and reminded and learn from the experience of others who are struggling as well to become the person God created us all to be. I know there is more, and I wake up today hoping to learn more.

Richard Rohr Meditation: “the Inevitable Spiral of Violence,” Center for Action and Contemplation, September 19, 2017. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Spiral of Violence (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), CD, MP3 download.

Joanna           joannaseibert.com