God is in the details, right? Right?
You know you've crossed some sort of line in your life as an ordained person when the thing that makes you most excited on a Sunday morning is to walk into your church and discover that the new Junior Warden has managed to install programmable/timer thermostats on the furnaces in the worship space.Aside from the squeeing over that (thanks be to God, the clergy and the vestry no longer have to remember to turn the heat up or turn the heat down, or which furnace has to be set lower than the other one for them to work properly), I had a very nice weekend which included a Quiet Day hosted by our chapter Daughters of the King. A local lay spiritual director came and led us through an introduction to centering prayer and lectio divina. We had 24 people throughout the day, including three Lutheran women from our neighboring ELCA congregation. We are working to build a stronger relationship with them, and I'm very excited to see the glimmerings of that.
Quiet Day reminded me that I am still not naturally a contemplative but I can play one on TV. No, seriously, being someone with some extrovert leanings, I find myself drawn to contemplative worship, as long as there are other people in the room being contemplative with me. So maybe one of my Lenten tasks will be to find a way to work some group contemplative work into my prayer life. Our 20 minutes passed much more quickly than I would have imagined.
The "Alleluias" are buried, the Feast of the Blessed Pancakes is tomorrow, and Lent begins. Ashes? Check. Lenten materials for all ages? Check. Ash Wednesday organized? Eh, that's what Shrove Tuesday is for. . .
Labels: church life
posted by Emily @ 8:45 AM
1 Comments:
I loved this post, because I definitely relate to the feeling of being drawn to contemplative prayer when everything about it seems contrary to your natural personality. This is definitely the case with me. Was the "local lay spiritual director" JP, by any chance? I see her on a fairly routine basis - we're both introverts with a bit of the rebellious teenager still in us!
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