Spiritual Gifts

 Buechner: Spiritual Gifts

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”—Frederick Buechner.

Our Sunday lectionary readings often are about a call, the call of the disciples, Jonah, Moses, and Paul’s call.
 In today’s world, Frederick Buechner gives us the best advice about how to find our ministry in perhaps his most quoted phrase about the meeting of “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.”

The Spirit gives us gifts for our ministry for doing God’s work. “The varieties of our gifts” are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, but we are unaware of many other spiritual gifts.

The Rev. Dr. Kate Alexander reminded us recently that we must not limit our spiritual gifts to those described in biblical times. Many spiritual gifts may initially not seem “spiritual.” She gives the example of proofing the Sunday bulletin to further God’s work as a vital ministry performed by people with a very detailed, unique ministry.

We must remember that the gifts are to further the work of God, not necessarily our work, our agenda, or our goals.

Besides giving us several inventories, material from the Stephen Ministry by Stephen Haugk leads us through other clues to our spiritual gifts. For example, the skills we see in our most admired person may be ours. The gift we use to bring about our most fulfilling life events may be our gift. The action of Jesus we most appreciate may be our gift.

 I also learned from Lloyd Edwards’s book Discerning Your Spiritual Gifts that significant gifts may come from our woundedness. For example, those in recovery stay by helping others recover from addiction. Likewise, those who have experienced the death of a significant person are often the ones who can later best help heal others who are grieving.

Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak is another classic book about where and how God leads us into the servant ministry God has created us to participate in.

My experience is that I am using my gift when the ministry in which I am involved energizes me. I put energy in, and more comes out. The tried and true biblical fruit of the Spirit can also indicate when we are using our spiritual gifts. Galatians 5 reveals that when we are connected to and guided by the Spirit, we will feel and know “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

God seeks each of us out and calls us by name. We are each so needed today and tomorrow in our troubled world, healing that only each one of us uniquely can do, where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”
Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

Ennegram Again and Epiphany

Enneagram Retreat again and Epiphany

“The good news is we have a God... who remembers who we are, the person who knits us together in our mother’s womb, and who wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.”–Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile in The Road Back to You (IVP Books 2016), p. 23.

Our former rector at St. Mark’s, Danny Schieffler, once invited the staff to the retreat center for our diocese, Camp Mitchell, for a day to study the Enneagram with Presbyterian minister and therapist Rebecca Spooner. Usually, staff retreats are about planning sessions for the year or exercises, such as the Myers-Briggs personality inventory study, to see how we can better relate to each other.

Knowing someone else’s Enneagram number can be helpful. Still, the heart of the Enneagram is about personal growth, learning about the mask we have developed for survival, and finding our true self, the person God created us to be.

So, our rector gave us a day away from our usual work during a busy liturgical season for our own personal enrichment. I wish I had done that when I was in the medical field, letting those I worked with know how much I cared about their individual growth. Let this remain an example for all of us.

This was my third Enneagram study course. The well-known sin of my Enneagram number is pride, and it was front and center when I heard about the retreat. Of course, I already knew all this. But to my amazement, I learned much more. This is my second lesson I learned. Exposure to a spiritual tool such as the Enneagram is more awakening each time we go through this process.

We spent much time on the Enneagram during my spiritual direction study. More and more, I see why. This tool helps us know who we are, the mask we have developed that has become our persona, and what the world thinks we are to make our way in the world.

Rebecca reminded us of Richard Rohr’s famous definition of the Enneagram, “the coat and hat we put on to weather the storm.” This persona has helped us survive, but we are now searching for our true selves, the person God created us to be. Learning about our Enneagram number can lead us to find our relationship with God that this mask we have developed has blocked.

The Enneagram is not for everyone. Rebecca reminded us that it is only one tool in our spiritual toolbox. If it is helpful, stick with it. If not, there are so many other tools to connect us to God. But if we relate to it, there is more gold than we can imagine.

This ancient tool has been proven to be true over many centuries. Epiphany is a great season to learn more epiphanies about ourselves through the Enneagram, especially if we study it with other spiritual friends.

More about Dreams

More about Dreams

“If we go to that realm (the inner life or unconscious) consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dreams work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination.

If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.”—Robert Johnson in Inner Work, Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth (Harper&Row 1989), p.11.

My spiritual director best helps me and others connect with God through dreams. Dreams are certainly one way that God, the dream maker, speaks to us. Studying our dreams is like learning a new language. It is the symbolic language of the unconscious. We connect to the unconscious with dreams, imagination, synchronicity, coincidences, or serendipity.

We study our dreams, learning about personal symbols specific to us. For me, the sea, water, and trees speak most often to me. However, there are also collective symbols that are universal, such as water representing the unconscious, light being our consciousness, a child being the creative part of us, animals representing instincts, vehicles representing energy or how we get along with a car representing our independent energy, and buses, planes, trains being collective energy.  

Dreams also speak in the language of mythology, fairytales, religious rituals, and music.

 Consider learning about dream work as a spiritual practice. Join a dream group. The gold in dreams is more easily and richly mined with the help of others. Two initial books to learn more about dream work are Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth. by Jungian analyst Robert Johnson and Natural Spirituality: A Handbook for Jungian Inner Work in Spiritual Community by Joyce Rockwood Hudson. Both are also excellent books to read together in a group.

If this spiritual discipline interests you, simply keep an electronic or old-fashioned notebook by your bed, write down your dreams as soon as you awaken, and see what happens!

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/