St. Marks Evangelical Lutheran Church
Greetings Good People,
May this Lent draw you into a deeper relationship with Jesus as you come to know him more fully and as you seek to serve him more faithfully.
This Lent I have invited you to fill up two cups, the To Be Cup and the To Do Cup. With these two cups sitting on your eating table, you are invited to reflect each day on what you have done to be more Christ-like and to do more like Jesus.
As I have begun preparations for Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, I have been reminded once again how little time we in the church spend reflecting on the Passion of Jesus, that is, his suffering, death and resurrection for our sakes and for the sake of the world. The Gospel writers consider this final week of his life to be worth a quarter of their words. Their fast-paced action of the first three quarters of their writings slows down as each writer reflects on the events and the meaning of Jesus’ Passion.
Simultaneously, I have been listening to James Finely reflect on The Interior Castle by St. Theresa of Avila. In this spiritual classic on prayer, St. Theresa invites us to imagine our soul being like an immense crystal castle with seven mansions. Through contemplative prayer we are invited to explore each mansion until we reach the seventh mansion where the pray-er and God become fully one with one another. Again and again, James Finely invites his listeners to a daily rendezvous with God in order to allow that union with God to begin in our prayer time and then flow into the rest of the day.
Also simultaneously, I have been reading of the absolute necessity to turn away from in our media- pulsing, crises-pounding, performance-driven world to turn to mindfulness, which is what the Christian mystics have been teaching for centuries. We are to pay attention to Christ by turning from the distractions of this world which lead to busyness, hurry, and folly.
I realized that I have not encouraged you all with sufficient vigor to pray contemplatively. To my dismay I realized that I taught my catechism students about prayer but have not sufficiently shown them how to pray. I hope at their young age that they might begin to integrate prayer practice into their lives before the world claims their souls with its 24/7 insistence upon stimulation and attention to itself.
So, to that end, I have prepared an exercise for them that I mailed to them prior to departing for our pilgrimage to Rome and Italy. Then it occurred to me that, perhaps, there might be others among us who would also like to become more adept at hearing Jesus speak. So, I have attached the prayer sheet suggestion I sent them.
Peace,
Pastor Doug
