Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director in advance of our session for January. I think it’s important to say what it is — and isn’t — as we start a new year. I’ve been writing these for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them.
Hi sister —
Just a quick note to confirm our Zoom appointment Monday at 6 p.m. and fill you in on what I’ve been doing since the last time we met. I didn’t do a whole lot of journaling, frankly, and I backburnered a couple of items I’d been working on last week when I got some troubling results back from a CT scan.
The results, as usual, were ambiguous. They could indicate malignancy, or they might be some other kind of inflammation. But they’re enough to worry my oncologist. So at best it means further testing and further consults with the oncologist and my pulmonologist. (One was a mass in my lung, but after 30 years of COPD my scans and X-rays look like a street map of Gaza City. So it could be practically anything.) I’ll keep you posted on what we find out. In the meantime your prayers, as always, are very much appreciated.
So I’ve switched gears lately.
In the last couple of days, I’ve been studying a post on the Jesuits in Ireland website by Brendan McManus SJ, an author and spiritual director of Belfast whose work has been helpful to me in the past. It went up in October, and it’s titled “Praying with anxiety: Ignatian survival tips.” It seems to fit the needs of the moment!
I think my approach to prayers of petition is pretty standard — if simplified — Jesuit practice: Quieting yourself with controlled breathing and a mantra; asking for a “grace,” or gift of the spirit, and seeing where it leads you; praying and reflecting on the prayer; and committing to action, i.e. “ask for advice or get some help, mend a relationship, change your fearful habits, act against negative thoughts, do more prayer etc.” I’ll link you to McManus in case I’m leaving out anything important. One more wrinkle: Several months ago, I latched onto St. Ignatius’ idea of spirits of consolation and desolation, and incorporate some of that into my prayers.
Link here: https://jesuit.ie/blog/praying-with-anxiety-ignatian-survival-tips/.
[I’m attracted to Jesuit spirituality because it’s so practical. I love an old story I got from James Martin SJ about the time a Dominican, a Franciscan and a Jesuit were on a retreat when the lights went out. It goes something like this: The Dominican crafts a homily on John 1:5, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.” The Franciscan composes a hymn to Brother Darkness and Sister Light. And the Jesuit goes down in the basement and changes the fuses.]
My mantra, which seems about right at this stage in my spiritual journey: Lord I believe; help my unbelief. [It comes from a miracle story, in Mark 9, and it perfectly matches my own ambivalence.] Sometimes when I’m really stressed, I’ll work the language from Ignatius’ discernment of spirits into my breathing, consolation when I inhale and desolation when I exhale. (This came to me spontaneously when I was on a gurney being wheeled into an operating room back in the spring, and I couldn’t remember the words of another centering prayer. It worked then, and it still calms me.) The graces I ask for have been pretty much the same since I was first diagnosed with cancer in 2022 — trust (which relates to the mantra), courage, perseverance or follow-through, depending on what’s going on at the moment.
All of this is a work in progress, and I’m still interested in getting back to the more reflective kinds of prayer.
Before I got the CT scan back and shifted gears, I’d been thinking — and writing — more about my reaction to the ongoing war in Gaza than my personal spiritual journey. I’ll share with you one journal that follows the steps of lectio divina and a quote another that brings up something I think is important about my attitude toward antisemitism.
The lectio is about an internet meme that’s often cited to the Talmud but is actually a paraphrase, by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, of an early Talmudic scholar named Rabbi Tarfon. It reads: Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. I wanted to explore it in more depth, so I followed the steps of lectio divina. It’s hard to paraphrase, but I think this passage comes close to summing up what I take away from it:
As I read it, Shapiro’s version is like a mashup of genres. It begins like a lament, one of those descriptions of suffering and anguish in the Psalms, but instead of crying to the Lord for deliverance, it turns to the kind of wise counsel found in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. And thus, according to Wikipedia, in Pirkei Avot or the Ethics of the Fathers. God watches over us, but it’s up to us to repair the world. Or try to.
The last line, in Shapiro’s version, also echoes the wisdom literature. To me it has a realistic, not-quite-cynical tone that’s more like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes than the hymns of praise to the Lord of Hosts in the Psalter. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. Realistic? Yes. Suited to the present moment? Yes. Absolutely. To all moments throughout time? Probably.
Link here: https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2023/12/14/lectio-tarfon/.
I won’t trouble you with the rest of what I posted — mostly about Gaza and what I call “performative anti-antisemitism” in a very politicized US House hearing in December — but there is one aside in the political piece that’s important enough to mention. I started by recalling I was often called “Ellerstein” when I was a kid down South (I think people sometimes conflated Yankees and Jews when they didn’t know many of either), and I thought it was pretty cool because I was a bookish kid who read a lot of Jewish authors. Then I got to the main point:
That doesn’t make me an expert on Judaism by any means. But it’s one reason I’m disturbed by the way accusations of antisemitism have been politicized on American college campuses. I don’t want to see the issue trivialized by partisan politics. Another reason, vastly more important, is that Krister Stendahl, a Swedish Lutheran theologian whom I also admire, maintained that Christians, especially Lutherans, have a responsibility to fight antisemitism. (I blogged about it HERE in 2022.)
“Most acts of anti-semitism have indeed been isolated acts,” Stendahl told a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor in 1981. “But the question we need to ask is: To what extent are these acts occurring in a Christian culture that pictures Jews as despicable?”
I *do* think Lutherans have a lot to answer for, both because of what Luther said about the Jews in the 1530s and the way some German Lutherans were more than complicit in the antisemitism of Nazi Germany. It complicates my reading of the gospel of John, and some of what we hear about the Scribes and the Pharisees in the New Testament makes me nervous, So the bumper sticker-ization (is that a word? if not it should be) of antisemitism in the “culture wars” bothers me. It’s real, it’s deeply ingrained and we shouldn’t be trivializing it.
Link here: https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2023/12/15/antisemitism/.
Well, that’s the news from Lake Woe-begone. See you Monday at 6!
[Uplinked Jan. 8, 2024]
Ordinary Time 