Sunday, February 08, 2004
A NEW OR PRE-MODERN UNDERSTANDING OF THE SPIRIT FOR POST-MODERN PILGRIMS
Over the last couple of months, we have looked at an authentic and critical understanding of the place of the Holy Spirit as the connectionbetween us as individuals and a community to and with the Godhead. We have identifed the place of attention to God as a spiritual discipline that enables people to encounter God in the forms of wonderment and Christian meditation or reflection. It is fastinating that this form of knowing God through relational experience was thrown out with the enlightenment replaced by a modern sanitised form of knowing through knowing facts about God instead of experience of knowing God. So we lost a key element of allowing God the Holy Spirit to be an integrated element to indidividual and collective spirituality.
I have got very excited to find that there was a pre-modern approach to this kind of following the Spirit in the ordinariness of life which was called ‘lectio divina’. This form of ancient worship was used by intentional Christian religious communities as a spiritual discipline of holy reading, wondering and responding to scriptural texts and life. It is interesting that a lot of the alternative worship communities and new forms of church are refinding this approach to worship and knowing God which is a return to an old pneumatology - of journeying with God.
Taylor puts it better than I can:
True attention Is an involuntary self-surrender to the object of the attention.
The Holy Spirit is that power which opens eyes that are closed, hearts that
are unaware and minds that shrink from too much reality. If one is open to
towards God, one is open also to the beauty of the world.
We are left with the challenge of developing a way of doing such worship in our post-modern context not to create weird church - but a way of worshiping that is deeply resourcing and based on relationship and the nature of God.
FOr those who are interested, I have done some work for my MA on this to explore how symbolic worship can assist such forms of worship, and specifically looking at Godly Play as a potential form.
See: M915 Worship ESSAY.doc M915 Worship REPORT.doc
Tools for this type of attentive encounter
I have found the daily wisdom from Frederick Buechner really helpful in my devotional life - a suggestion from Dave Tomlinson that I heartily recommend. Here is a taster:
Call to Prayer February 15th
Because the word God speaks to us is always an incarnate word - a word spelled out to us not alphabetically but in syllabels, but enigmativally, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see - the chances are that we never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to ear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognise, beyond all doubt, the however faintly we hear God, God is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to wach of us is both recoverable and precious beyind telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.
Over the last couple of months, we have looked at an authentic and critical understanding of the place of the Holy Spirit as the connectionbetween us as individuals and a community to and with the Godhead. We have identifed the place of attention to God as a spiritual discipline that enables people to encounter God in the forms of wonderment and Christian meditation or reflection. It is fastinating that this form of knowing God through relational experience was thrown out with the enlightenment replaced by a modern sanitised form of knowing through knowing facts about God instead of experience of knowing God. So we lost a key element of allowing God the Holy Spirit to be an integrated element to indidividual and collective spirituality.
I have got very excited to find that there was a pre-modern approach to this kind of following the Spirit in the ordinariness of life which was called ‘lectio divina’. This form of ancient worship was used by intentional Christian religious communities as a spiritual discipline of holy reading, wondering and responding to scriptural texts and life. It is interesting that a lot of the alternative worship communities and new forms of church are refinding this approach to worship and knowing God which is a return to an old pneumatology - of journeying with God.
Taylor puts it better than I can:
True attention Is an involuntary self-surrender to the object of the attention.
The Holy Spirit is that power which opens eyes that are closed, hearts that
are unaware and minds that shrink from too much reality. If one is open to
towards God, one is open also to the beauty of the world.
We are left with the challenge of developing a way of doing such worship in our post-modern context not to create weird church - but a way of worshiping that is deeply resourcing and based on relationship and the nature of God.
FOr those who are interested, I have done some work for my MA on this to explore how symbolic worship can assist such forms of worship, and specifically looking at Godly Play as a potential form.
See: M915 Worship ESSAY.doc M915 Worship REPORT.doc
Tools for this type of attentive encounter
I have found the daily wisdom from Frederick Buechner really helpful in my devotional life - a suggestion from Dave Tomlinson that I heartily recommend. Here is a taster:
Call to Prayer February 15th
Because the word God speaks to us is always an incarnate word - a word spelled out to us not alphabetically but in syllabels, but enigmativally, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see - the chances are that we never get it just right. We are so used to hearing what we want to hear and remaining deaf to what it would be well for us to ear that it is hard to break the habit. But if we keep our hearts and minds open as well as our ears, if we listen with patience and hope, if we remember at all deeply and honestly, then I think we come to recognise, beyond all doubt, the however faintly we hear God, God is indeed speaking to us, and that, however little we may understand of it, his word to wach of us is both recoverable and precious beyind telling. In that sense autobiography becomes a way of praying, and a book like this, if it matters at all, matters mostly as a call to prayer.
