Wednesday
Word . . . Spiritual Disciplines
I was supposed to be at the diocesan clergy retreat in Evanston this week, but I received an e-mail last Tuesday saying it had been canceled due to low turnout. The topic of the retreat was Spiritual Disciplines as a Foundation for Life and Ministry, and I was looking forward to it, even if it was in Evanston.
The topic, though, got me thinking about spiritual disciplines in general. Whether we realize it or not, we all have a variety of disciplines we follow in our lives – some more meaningful than others, some more rigorous than others. One discipline we have might be getting up early in the morning to exercise or spend time in quiet prayer/meditation before the busy-ness of the day. Maybe we have a discipline of intentional family conversations. Or maybe that Lenten discipline you followed has stuck with you and you continue to make it part of your daily life.
There are as many spiritual practices as there are people, I would imagine. Sometimes people get hung up about these, though. They want to do something meaningful. They want to do something regularly. And they want to do it correctly. About this last point, I remember a monk who came to lead a clergy retreat when I was in Maryland talking about this very thing. He said, “The spiritual or prayer discipline/practice that you DO is the right one.” The implication, of course, being that as long as you are doing something, you’re doing it correctly.
Read a chapter from the gospels each morning. Read a chapter from the gospels each evening. Pray through the Psalms each month (the BCP breaks the Psalms into groups that can be read/prayed morning and night). Take some time and pray from the Daily Devotions we have available at the church. The BCP has a list of prayers for all sorts of occasions beginning on page 810 – find a prayer there to pray daily. Find a short, meditative prayer you can easily repeat in times of silence (I find the trisagion on the bottom of pg. 356 to be helpful).
As the Chinese proverb says, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
When it comes to spiritual disciplines, start small, stay consistent, and go from there.
Blessings,
