Tag: Garden

From the Circus to the Garden: a ★★★★★ book review

Contemporary life is a circus like existence. We balance priorities, juggle demands, jump through hoops  as  we strive to tame our schedules. Or else we are distracted by the performances of others with little attention paid to our souls.  Susan Philllips, spiritual director and professor of sociology and Christianity at New College Berkeley asks, “How can we participate in the cultivation of our souls in a ceaselessly striving, circus-like culture that pushes us to be performers and spectators?” (15).  The Cultivated Life: From Ceaseless Striving to Receiving Joy is her answer to that question.  She unfolds the spiritual practices which cultivate fruitful living.

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The Cultivated Life by Susan Phillips

Phillips’s prose awakens a hunger for the deeper Christian life. In her introduction, she shares this story from Matt who came to her for Spiritual direction (not his real name). Matt said to her:

I have been a Christian for decades. I try to live the right way, but I am not sure I made much progress the way forward, you know, the way of growth even flourishing. . . . I feel, spiritually the same way I did when I became a Christian as a teenager. I haven’t grown but I’m older. . . . I’d like to end well, if you know what I mean. I am not sure  what way of living would make a change, a change to the rut I am in spiritually. (16)

If you have ever felt like this, you know the frustration of not living with Christ as your center,vnot maturing, and feeling unfruitful. Phillips describes this numbness and spiritual malaise as a circus–this place where we are either performer or spectator:

There are physical sensations, or the lack of them associated with the circus experience of ‘vegging out,’ ‘pedaling faster’ and ‘jumping through hoops.’ As we’re thrown into shallow places of performing and spectating, we are bereft of feeling and sensation (an-esthetic= without feeling) in both circus positions. Yet people long to see, here and feel. (25)

Phillips helps us move away from these roles by pursuing nurturing practices which cultivate our inner life.

There are several types of practices Phillips commends. She asks us to pay attention to our own life and the things we do which we find life-giving (chapter two). She advocates a contemplative listening posture– a posture of receptivity toward God and others(chapter three). She invites us to ‘stop’ and practice Sabbath by turning away from the circus  toward God (chapters four and five). In chapter six, Phillips calls us to a cultivated attention, a form of Christian mindfulness informed by “texts, communities, tradition, teachers and guides and the all-surrounding presence of God” (116).  She  also advises praying scripture (chapter seven),  and developing relational  attachments which nurture us,  such as spiritual direction and friendship (chapters  eight through eleven). These practices promote and help us live into a fruitful and complete life (chapter twelve and conclusion). An appendix gives guidelines for the practices of  contemplative listening, sabbath living, lectio divina, finding a spiritual director, and cultivating friendship.

Eugene Peterson writes in the forward, “Susan Phillips has been for many years my writer of choice in matters of spiritual direction and maturing a robust Christian life” (9). He describes  Phillips deft use of metaphor, her self-implicating naming and her skillful story telling (10-14).  I could make a similar statement about Peterson, whose own books have been my go-to books for spiritual insight and pastoral advice. His commendation of Phillips is true, and I can see her quickly becoming a favorite author. This book made me hunger for a deeper, fruitful life. It is well illustrated by examples drawn from Phillips’s life and from her role as a director and professor.

There are no shortage of books about spiritual disciplines. Some of them are mediocre, others quite good. However, the notion of spiritual disciplines often fraught by a too privatized and consumeristic picture of what it means to live the Christian life. Often we are given something new to try out as an addendum to our own over-full lives.  What I appreciate most about Phillips’s approach is the way she calls us to relationship–to finding a director or spiritual guide, and friends who will share the journey. Phillips focus is on personal, spiritual growth, but she sets this within a communal context.

Phillips’s metaphors and images are organic and relational.  She is wise guide, and there were no shortage of passages I underlined, mulled over and re-read.I give this five stars and recommend it for anyone else frustrated with life in the circus. May God use this book to enliven you with his life! ★★★★★

Note: I received this book from InterVarsity Press in exchange for my honest review.

 

 

 

Prayer for Week 3 of Lent

The Sun is shining and

Spring in infancy erupts everywhere.

The brown grass has turned green

and begun its seasonal sprawl

into my garden beds.

The  dry withered clump

of  chives

parts

as green fingers poke

through the earth.

But death hangs in the air

Frost will descend with

    the long shadow
      of night.

 

Some tender shoots will

shrivel and break

and we wait

for the life to come.

 

 

Jesus we celebrate your light

and see signs of new life in us.

Even as we remember your

face set like a flint towards

Jerusalem.

You were alive and Life itself

but you walked towards

arrest, mocking, beating and

death on a cross.

May the Lenten seeds

You have planted

grow Easter flowers.

May you guard the tender new life

you have given us.

And Lord give us strength

for the cold dark days ahead.

Unless a Seed falls. . .

Today is Memorial Day and in honor of the day, the Pacific Northwest Sun retreated to her home behind the cloud. The gentle wind blows as flags fly at half mast, and the rain falls. I look out at our yard. I am losing my battle with the weeds and I am planning my next assault on their domain but for now the solemnity of the day and the wet earth brings an uneasy truce. Do they wince knowing that their days are numbered? Or do they laugh trusting the strength of their number and their subterranean strength?

I look at my garden plot.  On the advice of my aunt, I got all my seed and seedlings in the ground this weekend, with the exception of my tomato plants which I will nurse  for a couple more weeks until the warmth of the coming summer arrives and they will take their place along the side of the house.  So on a day when my country honors their dead, I look for signs of life, practicing resurrection with last year’s seed.

With a vivid metaphor, Jesus once predicted his own death, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it reproduces many seeds. Those who love their life will lose it, while those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:23-25). The image is of wheat at the end of harvest. The plant, in its death throws lets her seed fall to the ground. From that death came life. The seeds I planted over the last several weeks came from plants long dead. They came to me in tiny packages. I wrested them from these  paper bag sepulchers and laid them in the earth, and as quick as three days later, life sprang out of death.  With this image Jesus showed us how his death, would inaugurate a movement more potent and tenacious than the weeds that threaten my lawn.

But it isn’t Jesus’ death we remember today (though we remember it always) but the death of American soliders, service men and women, who gave their lives for their country. The life I live here in a little suburban town on the verge of Canada was enabled by the sacrifice of others. The  pleasures and freedoms I enjoy and take for granted as my inalienable right, are mine because someone died to purchase this freedom.  This is a fact, and it is fitting to honor those who gave their life. I may sometimes balk at the justice and justification for the wars we find ourselves in, but I also know that the way of life that is possible in America and the way of life I love, was bought by another’s sacrifce.  I say this, as someone with pacifist leanings who hates the way war kills and destroys and forces us to demonize an enemy we fail to pray for.

But it is also a mixed blessing.  What life springs from the death of a solider? Americans like me discard these dead like the husks of old seed and feel entitlement without sacrifice. Americans like me (and you) have benefit from the spoils of war–manifest destiny and fruit from other men’s fields.  We have defended capitalism in the free world by sometimes supporting despots ever bit as bad as those we depose; We have destroyed terrorist networks but alienated our friends and sympathizers.  We have exacted revenge on our enemies under the guise of peace.  We sow to the wind, and reap the whirlwind with American service men and women killed across the globe.

Now, I know some will see the above paragraph as naive and you are probably right. I have no desire to dishonor our dead or the service people who currently serve.  They have given their lives for this country and I reap the benefits. But their death did not bring us the sort of freedom we have in Christ. There death, however noble, also enables the ugly American to use and abuse this earth’s resources and believe  we are entitled to everything.  From death springs life, but whose life? What death?

So this Memorial Day I honor our fallen soldiers for the blessings they have given us and hope for the peace and brotherhood that comes through Christ.

On planting a garden and wondering what will grow

I’m planting a garden. Well not quite, but I have dug out a bed and spent the weekend weeding the front plots (still more weeds to go, I’m afraid). On Monday I went with my oldest daughter and got seeds from the hardware store. And today I’m planting seeds in seedling trays.

The sun that was here on the weekend has disappeared and the ground is wet and muddy. My front lawn is over tall and when it dries out a little I’ll be out mowing. Despite having lived in the North West for a few years I’m not a big fan of rain. I like the green and growth but hate the wet and cold (yes Midwesterners I get cold in much warmer weather than you go swimming in). I am hoping a garden will change my perspective. I love Luci Shaw’s short but pogninant poem Forecast:

planting seeds
inevitably
changes my feelings
about rain

And so I set to work planting seeds: lettuce, beans, zucchini, cucumber, tomatoes, peas, herbs. I don’t have much of a green thumb. Actually I have an unexperienced thumb. Sure I’ve pulled weeds and helped friends in their gardens(even worked for a landscaper one summer) but I have never had a garden of my own. I am excited about what new growth comes with planting.seedling trays

In other ways, I am trying to attend to what God might be planting in me. If you know my story, this past year has been hard. Never in my life have I had difficulty getting a job. Yet here I am with education and skill and a pretty good work ethic and no gainful employment. Most of the posts on this blog are upbeat and I have used this year to further my education and develop personally. But a week does not go by, where I don’t sit down feeling paralyzed by anxiety. Three kids and a wife and not much cash is frightening. I feel inadequate, useless and scared that I can’t provide better for my family. My wife has a great part time job, but that is are only income. In the midst of this, God has provided for us and cared for us in incredible ways and this has been a season of me learning to trust. Still I long for satisfying work and the ability to breathe easy.

By training and calling what I really want to do is ministry. Not getting a job as a pastor at every single church I have applied for has deflated my confidence and been an occasion for self doubt. Am I doing what I should be doing if I can’t even get a job? Living in sleepy suburbia has also been challenging. I believe in incarnational ministry and you plop me down in a city, any city, and I know how to love my neighbors. I would connect with homeless people and people on the margins; my ministry experience is urban and I know how to engage a a city creatively. Here, I barely know my neighbors and don’t know how to break through the fences suburbanites put up. Nobody wants to sit and talk, and my attempts at meaningfully connecting feel awkward. But for better or worse, I am in this place and I wonder: What is God doing? What is he growing this season?

And so I plant a garden and become rooted to place while I wait, wondering what will grow in the yard and in me.