Early last week, I was gazing out my windows. The hostas are blooming, and that means for this two or three week period, the bumblebees have gathered. A word of advice: It is well worth our time to stop writing essays (in my case) or put down our phones, and simply watch the bumblebees. There’s …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uiv53v31eRA Prayer, in the traditional sense, has always involved two struggles for me. The first is the common struggle of a wandering mind, that is no doubt familiar to all of us. As we pray, random thoughts creep in, and sometimes crowd out, the inner life of prayer. The solution to that is practice and …
A couple of years ago I thought I needed a change because my life had become too insular. One of the things I thought I needed to do was re-engage my social justice sensibilities that had dulled and been slowly moved to the back of the shelf since leaving the Presbyterian Church some twenty years …
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world. …
When growing up I was taught that God wasn’t Santa Clause and prayer wasn’t just asking God for stuff. In order to avoid the pitfalls of just asking for stuff I was taught to pray the ACTS way: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. As my sense of prayer grew more sophisticated I realized that all prayer, …
Continue reading A Brief Introduction to the Prayer of the Heart
I have talked about the problem of translating “justice” (Hebrew is mishpat) previously in essays such as My Sojourn with the Social Justice Warriors, The Really Hard Part, and Oppressed-a-non. I want to revisit this topic in more depth as a starting place for this series of essays because we tend to turn the meaning …
In a previous essay I made the claim, in the context of Carl Jung’s Hero model of transforming the world, that liberal Protestantism is extroverted in sensibility while Orthodoxy is centroverted. In trying to sort out the implications of this, I keep circling back to the role of prayer in our efforts toward a just …
I must start with confession, for when one is arguing with a prayer during prayer, one has failed to actually pray. The prayer I was arguing with is the prayer for Justin Martyr’s feast day (today, on the Western Calendar). Lord God, in a wonderful way, through the folly of the cross, you taught your …
Fr. Stephen Freeman, speaking about the "paradox of prayer," points out that in the physical world we typically think in terms of cause and effect, and this is easily transferred to our thinking about prayer. But prayer must be understood in terms of relationship not cause and effect. He then says, The direct connection between …
Just Another Jim 