Tag Archives: discernment

When God is silent

Posted on June 5, 2010 | 1 comment

I am encouraged by this post over at Internet Monk on that perennial spiritual theme: how we work our way through God’s silences in our lives. I am especially encouraged by the reminder that we can expect as part of the “normal Christian life” to hear from God. This has not been part of my experience for some time, though I continue to pray.

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How God speaks to us through suffering, sin, and sorrow: Gregory the Great

Posted on June 3, 2010 | 3 comments

Talking with a colleague today about Pope Gregory I (the Great; 540 – 604), we both concluded the same thing: Gregory was one deep spiritual theologian who still needs to be heard today. My colleague told me that Calvin held Gregory in high esteem and once called him “the last of the orthodox popes.” Here’s a bit of what I learned about Gregory while writing Patron Saints for Postmoderns:

(If you are intrigued by what follows, then the next place to go is Carol Straw’s Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection.)

A Spirituality of the Everyday

Gregory . . . insisted that while pastors or laypeople are engaged in the active life, everything in their experience and in the world becomes potentially an instrument of God’s direct, special communication to them. Chance meetings. Storms. Landscapes. Crafted objects. A thousand other things. God is always speaking to us if we but have ears to hear and eyes to see. Unlike Augustine, who believed God both hid and revealed himself (thus keeping humans aware of how dependent they are on him), Gregory emphasized “God’s involvement with creation and the sacramental presence of spiritual truths in the things of this world.” In teaching this world-sacramentalism, Gregory launched another powerful force in the emergence of the new, sacred world of the medievals.

Of course, the possibility that God is speaking to us in our daily experiences in the world raises the question: How can we tell when it’s God talking? Continue reading →

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Posted in Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants, Patron Saints for Postmoderns

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When details get you down: How one of church history’s busiest, most spiritual leaders beat the rat race

Posted on November 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

In the rush of our shot-out-of-a-cannon lives, It’s so easy for us to feel drained, dried-out, and distant from God. Recently I had the chance to share the response of one spiritual giant (and ordinary, wounded man) to this syndrome. Over the years, Leadership Journal editor Marshall Shelley has graciously allowed me to share stories of some of history’s most intriguing Christian leaders in the pages of his high-quality magazine.

By the way, for those who like to bemoan the current state of the churches categorized under the loose heading “evangelical,” I would point out that any movement whose leaders are wise enough to look to the church’s heritage for wisdom has got a powerful antidote to modern fads and crotchets. Mr. Shelley knows this particularly well: his father, Bruce Shelley, is a church historian (long of Denver Seminary, author of Church History in Plain Language):

When Details Get You Down
Maintaining a spiritual life amid war, famine, and plague is what made Gregory the Great.

How can I maintain a spiritual life while dealing with people’s incessant problems and needs? The question didn’t originate with a pastor whose cell phone kept interrupting his prayer life. It goes back at least as far as Gregory, the first practicing monk to be elected, over his own objections, to the papacy. Gregory (540-604) preferred the life of solitude and contemplation, but it was his abilities as a leader as well as his writings on the integration of the inner life with active ministry that that caused him to be called, “Gregory the Great.” When he became pope in 590, Rome had been attacked for several years by the Lombards, a fierce Germanic tribe that had crossed the Alps to plunder the Eternal City. The emperor, distant in Constantinople, was distracted by a war with Persia, and could not offer aid to Rome. The years of war, famine, and plague had prompted Rome’s senatorial class to flee the city, when meant that the newly-elected Pope Gregory I was the only civil authority left. So he was immediately thrust into managing supplies and troop movements, and negotiating with terrorists. Continue reading →

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