Index of Rev. Grey's Columns

Last year in early January I was newly on sabbatical and reading about the lives of saints for my Christian Spirituality course at McCormick Theological Seminary. One thing that struck me about the saints was that many of them thought they had to forsake the physical world or at least deny it, in order to devote their whole lives to God. Their prayer and meditation was an inner discipline that shut out and minimized other relationships, with loved ones or with the natural world. And yet, even so, many of them were drawn to justice work, work with the poor and oppressed. Some even traveled great distances for that work, and lived for years on other continents far from home. There were a few saints whose spirituality included their love for others and nature. I resonate more with them. For me, love and friendship, which are disciplines of the heart, are essential to my spiritual life. And the world of nature beyond the self, in which I am contained and through which I am sustained, helps me center myself and move into inner reflection and even prayer.

The cold of January forces us to dwell more in inside places. Most of us walk less, and spend less time close enough to trees, streams or lakes. Even so we have the opportunity to look outside, and I encourage us to do that often. The trees are bare of leaves and we can see far in the distances. That, I find, also leads me to an inner attention. Paying attention to the inner and outer landscape, the truths in our hearts, and the realities of the world, like the saints who cared about the world, we can both feed the inner life and give ourselves to the care of family, and the ministries of neighborhood, city and world.

The prophets Jesus, and the one we honor this month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., may seem to have concentrated solely on their life-changing ministries, but it wasn’t so. They also engaged in the disciplines of private prayer and community worship, for they knew, I believe, that balancing, or going back and forth between the inner and outer life are what kept them whole, together, and going on.

Ours is not a pietistic faith. We are called not to isolation but to principled engagement with the world, to respond to the challenges of the religious right’s agenda of continuing war, worsening economic injustice that threatens the aged and the already poor, and attacks on the civil liberties not only of the marginalized but of us all. And we also expect ourselves to be the best family members and friends we know how to be. These are demanding life tasks. May this season teach us to balance the attention to them with attention to our inner lives, that we may be constant and enduring caregivers of life.

In faith, with love,

Nina