Spiritual Formation — St. Matthew's Church Blog

Offering Tomorrow

There’s a lot of talk these days about ‘anxiety.’ Like all words that get used casually and frequently, there comes a point when we need to redraw some definitions. Anxiety is a word that likely comes from a very old word meaning “to choke.” It describes the sensation of having one’s breath cut off–and the panic that results from the sensation. In more recent use, anxiety refers to a clinical psychological diagnosis referring to a spectrum of nervous conditions arising from a spectrum of causes ranging from heredity to traumatic experience. In popular use, it is often used as a synonym for ‘worry,’ when concern for the uncertain outcome of an event becomes distracting to the point of interrupting our lives.

Christian Life, Spiritual FormationFr. Hayden ButlerApril 13, 2024anxiety, control, surrender

The Final Christian Battle

It is very easy to view our growth during the season of Lent in the short term. By this point in the Lenten fast we have a good awareness of our own discomfort. Whether or not we chose our disciplines well, at a certain point we very much look forward to the Easter season. As Easter approaches, a healthy way to reflect on this past season is to determine which practices can be carried forward in our spiritual life. We should be evaluating our life of prayer. Have we grown in daily recollection? Are we attending to our life within the community of our parish? Have we prepared to meet the Easter season taking that hope back into our lives? However, although these questions are important, they are primarily focused on short-term growth.

Who Will Wake Me Up?

One of the great gifts of being a priest is being able to have frequent, good conversations with children in the parish. Their questions are my favorite because they come from an unpretentious—and often unrelenting—sense of curiosity. But one must be cautious. Their occasional and developmentally appropriate tendency to pepper adults with questions proves disarming until, all of the sudden, they ask something so central to the human heart and the life of faith that we can only be halted. For those who’ve been given the privilege of teaching children, our role is always to be ready for these moments. They can and do have the potential to make a life-long impact and much depends on what we are prepared to say when the opportunity arrives.

Losing the Way

Since last year, Timothy Lawrence and I adopted the tradition to read and discuss Dante’s Divine Comedy throughout the Lenten fast. This reading course was outlined by Fr. Hayden a few years prior for his students at Pacifica. As if enduring the silence and temptations of Lent are not enough, adding a medieval poetry epic about the 9 circles of hell, 7 levels of purgatory, and 9 spheres of heaven to that is a good penance. During the first few chapters, there is an emphasis on losing the way. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, Lent reveals much about ourselves. Our fears. Our worries. Our anxiety.

Sunday is Non-Transferable

It sometimes surprises new practitioners of Lenten disciplines when they do the math and find that there are not forty but forty-six days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. How do we account for the additional days? It is then that they learn of Sunday as a blessed relaxation of the Fast in observance of our weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Day of Resurrection. The Lenten Sunday puts a point on what is true of every Sunday: it is both a looking back and a looking forward. It is a perpetual memorial of Easter until Christ returns to raise and judge the quick and the dead.

Before the Silence

“In December 2016, I watched one of the most emotionally intense and scarring movies of my life on the big screen that had me questioning parts of my faith. This movie was Silence, written and directed by Martin Scorsese. Based on the novel by Shusaku Endo, Silence follows two Jesuit Priests, Fr. Rodrigues, and Fr. Garupe, leaving their home in Portugal to bring the Gospel to Japan and to discover the whereabouts of a well-known Priest who committed apostasy. Throughout the film, the themes of silence, despair, and hope appear and reappear. The scene that never left my mind was one during one of Fr. Rodrigues’ prayers.”

Crossing Life's Thresholds

In storytelling, crossing the threshold is essential for character development. It is the protagonist saying “yes” to the journey ahead as they leave their comfort zones to venture off into the unknown, unsure of what is out there or who they will meet. As Bilbo Baggins himself puts it in this same scene from the Fellowship of the RIng, “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Obstacles to Prayer

Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray:

A Little Leaven

My sourdough starter, Xeno, turns ten this year. Short for xenophilius or, roughly, ‘the one who loves the stranger,’ he has helped us to create food both sweet and savory to host anyone who comes to our house, to provide a gift for friends and family in seasons both festive and mournful. Xeno has sired many starters over the years, and the last I checked is now officially a grand-starter with his composition of yeast and lacto-bacilii replicating as we speak in mason jars all over Southern California.

How Romantic!

One of my most formative educational experiences came in the first weeks of my first class as an undergraduate in the English Department. The impassive professor of my British Literature survey called on me to define the term ‘romantic.’ I offered a vague, listless response, which revealed nothing but that I had not adequately prepared for our seminar that day. With a stern gaze through thick glasses he stared at me and declared, “Butler, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Only With Claws

In his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis tells the story of a young boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb who, through habitual self interest and a careless fixation with a dead dragon’s hoard of gold, becomes a dragon himself. When the dragon-boy encounters the Christ-figure of the novel, the great lion Aslan, Eustace is informed that in order to become ‘un-dragoned,’ he will have to wash off the dragon skin in a nearby well. Eustace sets to work, and begins to scrub layer after layer off of himself, diminishing his dragonish stature until he reaches one final, intractable layer of dragon-skin that scrubbing cannot remove.

On Liturgy: Liturgy and Experience

There is a resurgence in attraction to liturgy. This is, in part, a reaction against the subjectivity of contemporary worship. The latest new thing in worship can diminish in attraction over the years. It can come to feel like the latest attempt to manipulate the emotions—like most communication in the marketing and consumer culture.

On Liturgy: The 1928 Book of Common Prayer

This will be the first of several posts on the topic of liturgy. The word liturgy means literally “the work of the people.” It was used in ancient Greece to refer to offerings made for the public good. However, in the church the word liturgy refers to acts of corporate worship that form us into the Body of Christ.

Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. The advent of Christ – that Coming we’ve anticipated for weeks – is imminent. Like the virgins who await the bridegroom in Matthew 25, we must wake up and trim our lamps. The Bridegroom comes. It is time to meet him.

Our Debt to the Heretics

In our exploration of Christian heresies, we see much of the problem stems from the effort to square Jesus’s life and ministry with the oneness of God. In other words, how can there be only one God, as the Old Testament affirms, then how does Jesus fit into that equation? The heretic, whatever his motivation, usually winds up denying some aspect of Jesus in order to ‘fit’ Him into their view of God’s oneness, usually either by denying His humanity or His divinity.

Wordlessness

The Story of a Soul is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual autobiography. It tells the story of how, at a very young age, she conceived a passionate desire to become a Carmelite nun. She fought hard to be admitted early entry, and took the veil at the young age of 15.

Telling Stories

Once upon a time there were no stories. Nearly 14 billion years worth of tales untold until suddenly, Man, sitting around a fire telling stories. Some were true, some were lies, and some were fictional but somehow still true. But what is a story? When someone asks for “your story”, when my mom used to make sure she was home at noon every day to watch her “stories”, or when a reporter “smells a story”, is the same word being used for the same thing or is there a core thing we call a story? How can a painting tell a story, or a piece of music? How can a shoe on the side of the road have a story behind it?

Why Making Matters

We have faced the blank page. We have attended to silence. And we have accomplished an incredibly brave thing: we have gotten something on the page. It is not blank anymore—we are free to keep working toward a finished piece, whatever that might be, however many drafts it may take us to get there. We have committed to the creative act, and to whatever it may show us as we follow it through.

An Objective Offering

We have practiced silence. We have listened for the voice of the Spirit. We have put pen to paper, brush to canvas, spade to soil, knitting needles to yarn. Now what?

The Creative Act

In the next three blog posts, we will consider what I call “the creative act.” Before we dive in, let’s ask a question that may seem obvious: What is the creative act?

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