Insight and inspiration often come to me from the most unlikely sources and when I least expect them. Such was the case recently as I drove winding back roads of tidewater Virginia. The landscape is stunningly beautiful in an understated way, even as the vistas are quite predictable: stands of old trees frame fields of waving grasses, rolled bales of hay punctuate the harvested parcels like ellipses and prompt me to wonder what is missing or coming next. And then there are the many dozens of small churches that have stood along those roads for at least decades and more likely a century or two. [Read more…]

At dinner with a friend earlier in the week I surprised myself when I said that one of the challenges of growing older is adjusting to the increased frequency with which we encounter endings. Whether or not my observation is objectively true is open for debate. These facts are not: endings are inevitable, and we respond to them differently as we mature. Both endings themselves and our reaction to them are important in life generally and critically important in what we might term our spiritual lives or journeys. The great psalmist understood these things. [Read more…]

Last week’s post ended with my encouraging you to record the images, or metaphors, that David uses to describe his God. Good poets carefully choose their images to be more than what they are– that is, to transport the reader or listener beyond the “thing” itself to a deeper level of understanding. Poetic images generally call out to us to respond not only with our minds but also our senses – and when the images are in the psalms, we can add our hearts and our spirits – as well as with our own experiences to uncover their meaning. Yes, understanding poetry and the images on which it turns is, in part, experiential. Therein lies a conundrum. On whose experiences should we rely and on whose does and should meaning rest? [Read more…]

In my last post I promised we would turn attention to the psalms next. As we do so, we move away from examining what others, including God, have said about David to listening to what David has to say about himself– in relation to and in relationship with the Lord. The last point is important because that relationship is central to the vast majority of the psalms of David. [Read more…]

Last Saturday I spent the morning in a workshop on the ancient prayer tradition known as Lectio Divina. This centuries-old form of meditation has been engaged by Christians since at least the 4th century and it is actually much older than that. In fact the practice is rooted in the ancient Hebrew tradition of haggadah, with which Jews in Jesus’ time would have been familiar. Both Lectio and hagaddah center on studying the scriptures deliberately and interactively in what might be best described as a listening way. [Read more…]

Early one morning in February 2005 I sat alone in a one-room building that had once been a corncrib atop a hill called Mt. San Angelo nestled in the Shenandoah. The quiet and isolation of that tiny space conspired with the sheer beauty of the surrounding Blue Ridge mountains to make it a place of inspiration. I was there to be still, to practice my art of poetry. [Read more…]