NOTE FROM CM: Though Damaris’ post is not about sports, it does address our culture of entertainment and “hyperstimulation” in which sports plays a part. As an example, having spent hours in the Super Bowl Village over the weekend, I can safely say it was a sensory extravaganza — all stimulation all the time. What’s [...]
Virtue and the Limits of Vulnerability
9 Jan by
I received some thoughtful mail as a result of my response to Mark Driscoll’s book on marriage. Here is one of the best examples: Dear Chaplain Mike, I have just finished reading your post Top of My “Don’t Read” List. In it you mention that American culture has a strong “therapeutic ethos” and that this [...]
Looking forward to “Sabbath”
28 Sep by
If there is no Sabbath — no regular and commanded not-working, not-talking — we soon become totally absorbed in what we are doing and saying, and God’s work is either forgotten or marginalized. When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easier to develop god-pretensions. [...]
Song for Ordinary Time (14): Order My Life
25 Sep by
This is a simple worship chorus I wrote years and years ago, linked with two verses from a favorite hymn. Together, they form a prayer that God will bring order to our inner worlds and cause us to cling to him. The recording is by no means professional, but I hope it will not detract [...]
Watering the Garden
23 Sep by
Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Christian, taught extensively about the inner life of prayer and communion with God. She compared it to watering a garden. Without prayer our capacity to love will wither and die. But not all prayer nourishes our souls the same way, just as not all forms of watering a garden are [...]
Prepositions Matter
23 Sep by
“…the grammarian’s last daughter opened her bag. “Out came the prepositions: of, to, from, with, at, by, in, under, over, and so on. When she’d put them into the bag, they had seemed like hooks or angles. Now, departing in orderly rows, they reminded her of ants. Granted, they were large ants, each one the [...]
A Simple Pattern of Spiritual Formation
18 Sep by
I’ve been reading Skye Jethani’s excellent new book, With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God. I hope to comment on it more this week, including a full review. For now, as a Sunday afternoon meditation, I offer this excerpt in which Jethani sets forth a cycle that describes the way many of us experience [...]
Wild Things I Cannot Control
16 Sep by
I was reading through some old files the other day, and I came across a NYT column by David Brooks about the film, “Where the Wild Things Are.” I remember enjoying the film; his commentary on it prompted my thinking and imagination even more. For Brooks, the movie shines light on the matter of personal [...]
A Wise Word about Spiritual Formation
15 Aug by
By Chaplain Mike I have not been able to get this sentence out of my mind since reading it in the foreword to Carlson and Lueken’s book, Renovation of the Church, discussed here last week. It speaks to the salutary effects that seasons of disorientation can have on our spiritual formation. Can it really be [...]
Meditating on Scripture
27 Jul by
By Chaplain Mike I was convinced at an early point in my adult Christian life that learning, loving, and living the Bible was essential to my Christian growth. My journey for much of the past thirty-five years has been primarily about studying and teaching the Scriptures. If I had not been a pastor, I would [...]
