Posts Tagged ‘Invitation to Solitude and Silence’
Sane Rhythms of Work and Rest in Your Life as a Leader
“We are blessed with inner rhythms that tell us where we are, and where we are going. No matter, then, our fifty and sixty hour work weeks, the refusing to stop for lunch, the bypassing sleep and working deep into the darkness. If we stop, if we return to rest, our natural state reasserts itself.…
Read MoreAn Act of Discipleship: Walking with Christ through Holy Week
Guidance on using the lectionary. “It is not the act of a good disciple to flee from the cross in order to enjoy an easy piety.” St. John of the Cross Several years ago during this season, my family gathered to bury my grandmother. She was 92 years old and greatly loved by many. On Saturday…
Read MoreObserving Lent: Seeing What We’re Missing
Lectionary readings for Fourth Sunday of Lent Cycle A: 1 Samuel 16:1-13; Psalm 23; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41 Guidance on using the lectionary. “Spiritual masters often refer to a kind of “dread,” the nagging sense that we have missed something important and have been somehow untrue—to ourselves, to others, to God. Lent is a good…
Read MoreSweet Hours of Prayer: How Fixed-Hour Prayer Nourishes the Soul
“At last I believe life itself is a prayer, and the prayers we say shape the lives we live, just as the lives we live shape the prayers we say.” –Ted Loder The first time I participated in fixed-hour prayer, I felt like I had come home to a place I had never been…
Read MoreSolitude: In God for the World
“Wherever there is something in our life that is not conformed to the image of Christ, there is a place where we are incapable of being all God wants us to be with others … a place where our life with others is hindered and limited and restricted in its effectiveness and in its fullness…
Read MoreSabbath in Late Fall
For everything there is a season… Sometimes on the Sabbath all you can do is settle into the soft body of yourself and listen to what it says. Listen to the exhaustion that is deeper than tiredness the hunger that is for more than food the thirst that is for more than drink the longing…
Read MoreChristian Busyness and Solitude and Silence
To celebrate the launch of the expanded edition of Invitation to Solitude and Silence we are going to post a series of video clips from an interview done at Mountain Christian Church. In this expanded edition of the award-winning book Invitation to Solitude and Silence, spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton guides individuals on a step by step journey into solitude and…
Read MoreInvitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence
“Without solitude it is impossible to have a spiritual life.” –Henri Nouwen It is a wonderful thing to be invited. Not coerced or manipulated but truly invited. To the home of someone you have looked forward to getting to know…to a party with fun people…on a date with someone who is intriguing. There is something…
Read MoreAvailable to God on Behalf of Others
“On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.” Psalm 138:3 This week I went to a funeral with my daughter, Haley. It was the funeral for one of her friends who died in a complicated way from causes that were not entirely clear. An Eagle Scout, a disciplined athlete,…
Read MoreHoly Week: An Invitation to Walk with Christ
“Stay together, friends, don’t scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake.” Rumi In her book Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris comments that in a monastery, Holy Week is “a total surrender to worship.” This surrender allows for a greater focus on the events leading up to and moving us through Resurrection Sunday—Jesus’ gathering…
Read MoreLent: An Invitation to Return to God
“Yet even now, says the Lord, repent and return to me with all your heart.” Joel 2:13 Today is Ash Wednesday—the beginning of the Church’s observance of the Lenten season. It is a space in time in which we are called to stop whatever we are doing, no matter how important it might be, and…
Read MoreMake a Joyful Silence
“On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.” Psalm 138:3 Long ago, a wise spiritual director said to me, “Ruth, you are like a jar of river water all shaken up. What you need is to sit still long enough so that the sediment can settle and the water…
Read MoreDiscernment: Finding God in All Things
“Discernment in its fullness takes a practiced heart, fine-tuned to hear the word of God and the single-mindedness to follow that word in love. It is truly a gift from God, but not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge.” –Ernest…
Read MoreThe Conundrum of Calling
“Calls are essentially questions. They aren’t questions you necessarily need to answer outright; they are questions to which you need to respond, expose yourself, and kneel before. You don’t want an answer you can put in a box and set on a shelf. You want a question that will become a chariot to carry you…
Read MoreEpiphany: A Time for Seeking and Finding
“When the wise men saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they knelt down and paid him homage.” –Matthew 2:10, 11 Today is the day when Christians celebrate Epiphany—the journey of the wise men to find the Christ…
Read MoreCrossing the Threshold into Lent
Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something more than interesting or entertaining or thoughtful. Oh God, let something essential happen to me, something awesome, something real. Speak to my condition, Lord and change me somewhere inside where it matters. Let something happen which is my real self, Oh God. —Ted Loder Growing up…
Read MoreAdvent 4: Saying Yes to God
“When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb… And blessed is she who believed that there would be fulfillment of what was spoken to her…
Read MoreAdvent 3: A Community of Waiting and Expectation
“As the people were filled with expectation and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, ‘One who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals…’” Third Sunday of Advent Luke 3:7-18…
Read MoreAdvent 2: Preparing the Way
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee…during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness…He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of…
Read MoreAdvent: Light of Our Darkness
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among the nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the wave. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then we will…
Read MoreReleasing Ourselves to God: A Leader’s Invitation to Solitude and Silence
Editor’s note: The following article is adapted from Dallas Willard’s forward to Invitation to Solitude and Silence (Ruth Haley Barton, 2004). In it he identifies solitude and silence as the most radical disciplines of the Christian life because they require us to release ourselves into God’s hands in very concrete ways. Knowing the particular challenges…
Read MoreThe Gift of Waiting
God comes like the sun in the morning—when it is time. We must assume an attitude of waiting, accepting the fact that we are creatures and not creator. We must do this because it is not our right to do anything else. The initiative is God’s, not ours. We are able to initiate nothing; we…
Read MoreAre You Dangerously Tired? Exploring the Symptoms and Sources of Spiritual Exhaustion in Ministry
“Because we do not rest we lose our way. Poisoned by this hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we can never truly rest. And for want of rest our lives are in danger.” Wayne Muller One of the deadliest issues facing ministry leaders today is the fact that…
Read MoreThe Transforming Leader: Giving the Best I’ve Got
Spiritual transformation has become quite the buzzword in Christian circles today. The good news is that it speaks to our desire for more in the spiritual life: more than just head knowledge, more than rules that merely govern external behaviors, more than religious activity loaded onto lives that already feel unmanageable. The language of spiritual…
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