A Good Retreat Leader

20 01 2012

Because I find that intentional retreat has become a frequent mode of spiritual leadership for me over the last twenty years, both in my life and in my ministry to Christian leaders, I’m always watching for resources on this theme.

One older book I came across on the theme of retreat is Time to Spare, written by Douglas Steere in 1949. Listen to this description of a good retreat leader (and thanks for understanding the male-focused language reflecting the writer’s time if not his heart):

“The retreat leader who in all that he does and is shows that he honestly cares for each of the retreatants, that what happens in each of them matters to him, that he is the kind of person who understands and yet is deeply respectful of the hidden life in each, is one who is likely to become a true guide. But in his instruction he must speak bluntly and plainly to these questions that are consciously or unconsciously in the hearts of his listeners. He must diagnose and expose the hindrances and must make wholeness attractive. If he can speak in simple parables, in illuminating examples, no matter how personal they may be, and in convincing experiences and do it in such a way that room is left for the Invisible Companion to speak to the heart of the listener while this is going on, he is again moving in the way of the true guide. Sympathy, good sense and a veteran’s experience in the life of prayer are good qualifications in such a guide.” (Steere, Douglas V. Time to Spare. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1949, p. 65-66.)

For reflection: What line in this extended quotation hits closest to home for you? Which one either captures something you long for in your own life, or in your ministry to others?

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Categories : A Good Word, Retreat, Spiritual Direction

Prayer: God’s Transforming Presence

9 01 2012

Prayer is both the life of all lives, but also the death of everything that isn’t life. I find that a challenge because there are still so many ways I think of something as life that just isn’t. I read about this sort of wisdom in some of the older writers:

“…Augustine Baker can be understood when he speaks of the crisis situation into which genuine prayer plunges man and insists that the steady practice of prayer is the greatest mortification of all. He does not mean that prayer itself is the sacrifice. But that persistent prayer brings man into a situation where the presence of the living God will irradiate him and leave him no alternative but rebuild the room, or to break off the contemplation. Jean Grou has said, ‘The holy spirit will either control all of your actions or cease to govern your prayer,’ or the matter could be put still more bluntly in Russell Maltby’s words, ‘When we go into God’s presence, we must surrender.’” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957, p. 44).

If prayer is relationship with God, then living my life as prayer means continuing to linger in God’s presence. This will mean an exposure of that in me which is contrary to God, even opposed to God. Either that impulse will win and I will neglect the Presence, or I will bring that impulse into God’s loving, healing presence and He will win. And He’s a much more gracious Winner!

For reflection: What draws to you to prayer? What drives you away from prayer? Are you able to discern the source of these impulses and recognize the Spirit’s nudge? 


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Categories : A Good Word, Inner Life

The Divine Undoing

4 01 2012

Fifty years ago, a Quaker professor wrote these words about the busyness he witnessed in the churches of his day. They seem at least as true today:

“In religious circles we find today a fierce and almost violent planning and programming, a sense that without ceaseless activity nothing will ever be accomplished. How seldom it occurs to us that God has to undo and to do all over again so much of what we in our willfulness have pushed through in his name. How little there is in us of the silent and radiant strength in which the secret works of God really take place! How ready we are to speak, how loathe to listen, to sense the further dimension of what it is that we confront.” (Steere, Douglas V. Dimensions of Prayer. New York: Women’s Division of Christian Service, 1962, p. 4.)

In my work on this ‘unhurried time’ writing project, I continue to see evidence that our hurry, rather than getting more done, often gets the wrong thing done, and a whole lot of it. Christ followers learn to slow down enough to listen well to the Master and what it is that He actually wants.

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Intercession as Vital Ministry

11 09 2011

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, I’m flying back from leading “An Unhurried Day with Jesus” in Camas, WA. It seemed right to share a few thoughts about intercession as a vital ministry. I remember, as you probably do, where I was when I got the news of the World Trade Center plane crashes. I remember, too, the eeriness of flying on 9/14, the first full day when flights had been resumed. Ontario airport was a ghost town that morning.

Below are a couple of quotations that recently helped me appreciate the vital work of intercession as ministry:

“…at no point do we touch the inner springs of prayer more vitally than…when we hold up the life of another before God, when we expose it to God’s love, when we pray for its release from drowsiness, for the quickening of its inner health, for the power to throw off a destructive habit, for the restoration of its free and vital relationship with its fellows, for its strength to resist a temptation, for its courage to continue against sharp opposition — only then do we sense what it means to share in God’s work, in His concern; only then do the walls that separate us from others go down and we sense that we are at bottom all knit together in a great and intimate family. There is no greater intimacy with another than that which is built up through holding him or her up in prayer.” (Steere, Douglas. Prayer and Worship. Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1978, p. 39-40).

Interceding for the real needs of others knits our hearts together with them in a way nothing else quite does.

“Forbes Robinson’s Letters to His Friends reveal his constant use of this form of prayer for his Cambridge associates. He remarks in one letter that if he would really reach some need in his friend’s life, he would always prefer a half-hour’s silent petition for him to an hour’s conversation with him.” (Steere, Douglas. Prayer and Worship. Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1978, p. 40).


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Prayer and Distraction

8 09 2011

“There are the inevitable outer distractions to silent prayer. A mother is calling her child, the wind howls against the house, the rain beats down, and at once the drawbridge of the mind is let down and the attention rushes out across it. This is natural. There is no cause for alarm or dismay. Bring it gently back and go on. It often helps to pray the distraction directly into the prayer: ‘Oh God, continue to call me as the Mother does her child and I shall answer’; ‘the wind of God is always blowing, but I must hoist my sail’; ‘Oh God, saturate my soul with the rain of thy redeeming love.’” (Steere, Douglas. Prayer and Worship. Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1978, p. 27-28).

This has been a very practical piece of spiritual direction for me. Too often I have fought against distractions, both outward and inward, when I was praying. When I began to include them in my prayer, it changed everything. I thank God for the dog that is barking below our home and pray for its family. I give thanks for the heat of the day, and for the sun that warms us. Pray for the distraction rather than fight against it. Try that next time you feel distracted in prayer. I’d like to hear your experience.


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Cultivating a Habit of Prayer

4 09 2011

“The habit [of regular private prayer] is built not in talking about prayer, nor reading pamphlets and books about it, nor hearing lectures about it, but by appearing day after day at the appointed place, at the appointed time, and staying put as we pour out our hearts and as we hold them cupped and open for His direction. Any man who is past the romantic honeymoon stage in the life of prayer and has settled in for the long run, knows how profoundly the very practice of this exercise itself differs from the high and luminous moment when in worship he may one day have felt how gloriously glad he would be to have time to spare for God. He knows that he has been beaten down and has stopped his prayers completely a hundred times and more. He knows how often he has drowsed his prayers, day dreamed them, roted them, or even hated them with an intensity that might almost have tipped him off that he was wrestling with demonic forces.” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1957, p. 135).


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Categories : A Good Word, Prayer, work

Changing Practices and an Unchanging God

14 08 2011

Gazebo at the Young Life Conference Center in Jarabacoa, DR

“For any forms of the cultivation of the religious life are in themselves always subject to change in order to meet the changing needs of the seeker. They are scaffolding to be torn down and re-erected in new forms in accordance with the stage of growth of the life structure they seek to aid. To take them as an end in themselves is idolatry and blasphemy.” (Steere, Douglas. Prayer and Worship. Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1978, p. 9-10).

Practices, disciplines, methods are all scaffolding that serves to enable growth. They are not a focus in themselves. The focus is always on our conversational, responsive relationship with God. Obedience is a relationship of listening and responding. Am I hearing the particular word of God for me at this time and place of my journey? Do I believe He desires to give me personal guidance in my life and my work? Or, do I believe He’s given me general guidance and that my main job is to figure it out myself and do stuff for Him? Do I envision Him in the distant background or as God-with-me?


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A Moment That Changes Everything

17 03 2011

(A repost from December 2007)

This week, I’m enjoying some good reading, reflection and writing in preparation for a four-day retreat I’ll facilitate this extended weekend for a group of college ministry leaders.

This morning, I’ve been reading a little pamphlet by Douglas Steere titled The Hardest Journey. It is a presentation he gave in 1968 here in Southern California (at Whittier College) on the cost of spiritual renewal. I’ve had it in my library, but ran across when referring to one of his other titles on the theme of retreat–Time to Spare.

Steere mentions a question asked by another Quaker:

“Have you ever had a moment of awe and glory that has cloven your life asunder and put it together again forever different than it was before?”

What a question! For me, there have been a few moments like that in my spiritual journey. The one that came to mind first, though, was the event that is recorded on page 1 of my current journey. That entry is dated January 20, 1990 and it was a description of my experience of solitude, silence and prayer led by Wayne Anderson as part of the Fuller course Paul Jensen taught that Winter 1990 quarter. God opened my life wide that day, spoke needed words of compassion and admonition, and began to put me back together in a way that has changed the course of the last eighteen years.

Have you ever had such a moment? When was it? How did God take you apart? How did He put you back together?

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A Good Word: Prayer as Strategic Ministry

2 01 2011

“Yet at no point do we touch the inner springs of prayer more vitally than [in intercession]. For when we hold up the life of another before God, when we expose it to God’s love, when we pray for its release from drowsiness, for the quickening of its inner health, for the power to throw off a destructive habit, for the restoration of its free and vital relationship with its fellows, for its strength to resist a temptation, for its courage to continue against sharp opposition — only then do we sense what it means to share in God’s work, in His concern; only then do the walls that separate us from others go down and we sense that we are at bottom all knit together in a great and intimate family. There is no greater intimacy with another than that which is built up through holding him or her up in prayer.” (Steere, Douglas. Prayer and Worship. Richmond IN: Friends United Press, 1978, p. 39-40).

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A Good Word: Spiritual Sunrise After a Dark Night

18 10 2010

“Teresa of Avila and her great companion, John of the Cross, have both written of a stage on the [journey] known as the dark night of the soul, where all the light of warmth and joy in their spiritual lives seemed quenched, and where in their desolation they seemed destined to go on wearily plodding through the darkness, forsaken by every comfort and consolation, and despairing of ever finding light again. To those who flung themselves on God and went on, however, they give ardent testimony that this state passed away and a new sense of their utter reliance on Him and His bounty emerged. Now they were tested. Now they knew at first hand that nothing, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38, 39). Until this has taken place the estate of rapture is still young and [immature] and in a way is not yet theirs. Only as they work through it, incorporate it, lose it, and by faithfulness regain it again do the deeper stages of contemplation come to them.” (Steere, Douglas. Work & Contemplation. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, p. 133-34).

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