"The Garden" A Guest Post by Kathleen Deyer Bolduc

In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life. James 1:21 (The Message)

This morning I bring my Bible, journal, and cup of tea into the garden. A light mist hangs over the fields across the road, and I am surprised to see tender green shoots of corn forming rows where yesterday there was nothing but dirt. All around me, Dame’s Rocket thrusts purple and white spires toward the skies like holy hands reaching toward heaven. Boxwood shimmers greenly in the breeze, and a yellow weed at the fence line bursts into flame as a sunbeam peeks through the clouds.

The words of Psalm 63, my reading this morning, reverberate through my mind. “O God, thou art my God, I seek thee, my soul thirsts for thee; my flesh faints for thee, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.”

In the sanctuary of this garden the desert landscape of my heart—that dry and dusty place where worry and anxiety about my son, Joel, who has autism, sometimes threaten to overwhelm me—turns to an oasis of green, flowing with streams of living water. Prayer rises up within me as praise.

No wonder poets and songwriters often refer to the garden as a metaphor for prayer.

            And yet, gardens are not always lush and beautiful. Think of the garden in the midst of drought. Parched plants wilt. Green leaves turn to brown. What was abounding in exuberance just weeks before suddenly sags under the weight of cloudless skies with no promise of rain in sight. Nothing will revive the drought-stricken garden like a soft, gentle, soaking rain.

            It is no different for the gardens of our hearts. Sometimes, in the words of my son Joel at the end of a major melt-down, “We need Jesus!”           

            As the mother of a son with autism, I was first drawn more deeply into prayer because of an intense thirst for God’s presence. I was desert-thirsty, parched for the living waters Jesus promises in John 4:14: “. . . but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The more I spend time with God the more the garden of my heart blooms with an unquenchable love for the things of the Spirit. I need God’s presence just as my garden needs the rain.

Take some time today to be quiet and meet with God. Listen to what rises up from within. Have a conversation with God. You may have questions to ask Him. Ask, expecting to receive an answer. Tell Him what’s on your heart. Be honest with Him. Bare your vulnerable places. And then, once you’ve emptied your heart, simply listen. He has much to say to you.

Lord, I thank you and praise you for your living waters. Open me up, Lord. Open me up to your thirst-quenching presence. Water me, Lord. Water me.

·         Where do you most often meet God? Nature? Bible study? Service? Worship? Journaling?

·         How might you establish a pattern of going there to pray on a consistent basis?

·         In what way do you most often pray? Do you feel “pot-bound”? Might God be calling you to a new prayer avenue?

·         What kind of prayer will help you more often to be aware of Jesus’ presence with you?

Excerpted from The Spiritual Art of Raising Children with Disabilities (Judson Press, 2014)

Used with permission

The mother of a 29-year-old son with autism, Kathleen Bolduc is a spiritual director in Oxford, Ohio, and The Spiritual Art of Raising Children with Disabilities and Autism & Alleluias. Kathy blogs at www.specialneedsparenting.net. 

the author of several books on faith and disability, including

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Join Kathy at a free webinar: The Spiritual Art of Raising Children with Disabilities: Learning to Let Go and “Be” - Thursday, May 22^nd, at 1 pm. If you can’t attend at that time, register and participate at your leisure. You are promised an hour of rest and refreshment using art, music, and Scripture. Sign up here:  https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/381076121

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One lucky reader will a free copy of this good book.  To enter the contest, all you have to do is leave a comment about the blog post or leave a question for Kathy about the book.  You'll have until Wednesday evening at 8:00 to be entered into a drawing to win the book.  To enter, you must leave an email address with your comment (so I can contact you to get your mailing address for the book!).  Books can only be send to addresses in the United States and Canada.

"The First Five Things Every Spirituality Writer Should Know" -- A Guest Post by Vinita Hampton Wright

The First Five Things Every Spirituality Writer Should Know

—Vinita Hampton Wright

There are really only so many things that go wrong in writing. After twenty-three years as an editor, I’ve made thousands and thousands of fixes, but often they applied to the same mistakes made again and again. Here’s a short list of issues I encounter often when editing material on spirituality.

Nothing makes up for poor craftsmanship.

I can say this confidently as a member of the publishing community: The number one reason a manuscript is rejected is that the writing just isn’t good enough. With so many manuscripts floating around, editors can afford to be picky and will dismiss so-so writing—usually after reading a paragraph or two. Most readers are impatient and won’t stay with writing that is mediocre—they will click to another blog or pick up another book. Especially now that cyber tools make it possible to generate and publish material almost instantly, writing must be flawless and beautiful to stand out above all the rest.

Save teaching for the classroom and teaching for the pulpit.

People attend a class to learn or go to church to hear a sermon. They open a book or an article for a different experience. Welcome and respect the reader. Give her an experience, not just information. Walk alongside her as a fellow explorer rather than stand in front of her as an authority.

Fiction is about storytelling, not teaching.

If you want to write fiction, then serve the story above all else. A good story will reach the reader’s heart and mind because it is well written, its characters are interesting, and the plot compels the reader to find out what happens next. Good fiction also contains moral, philosophical, and spiritual content, but it must grow organically from the story. Good fiction is not a moral lesson dressed up with characters and a plot; that’s a fable or a parable—and those have their purpose, too, but they are not novels or short stories.

The reader becomes engaged when she has to do some of the work.

Spiritual writing draws upon the reader to add his experience and story to the mix. It invites the reader to ponder and puzzle. Spiritual writing engages the reader, and to engage the reader, the writer must respect and care about the reader. Also, refrain from spoon feeding information and supplying answers; invite the reader to articulate the questions and wrestle with them. 

Personal writing must be transformed in order to work as public writing.

The most powerful writing begins as personal writing—the writer works through an issue, mines wisdom from a memory, or tries to put an experience into perspective. Rarely does such writing automatically translate well to the larger audience. It must go through a revision process before it can be accessible and useful to others. Sometimes the revision is minimal, but more often it’s pretty extensive. When you transform personal writing for public reading, you revise it with the reader in mind, which means that you recede into the background. Which means that some of the material that’s quite meaningful to you will be changed or deleted. In the realm of spirituality writing, this is called service.

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Vinita's The Art of Spiritual Writing is now available at fine booksellers everywhere.  It's a must read for any writer -- from beginner to expert.

"Eyes of the Heart" -- A Review

Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a ChristianContemplative Practice, Christine Valters Paintner’s latest book, is moving, helpful, challenging and inspiring.  Which is not surprising, given Christine’s record of turning out such books (two of my favorites are The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom and Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction).

Christine, besides being an author, is a Benedictine Oblate, writer, artist, spiritual director, retreat facilitator, and teacher. She’s also the on-line abbess for Abbey of the Arts, an amazing site that you should know about, if you don’t already.  I’m a regular visitor to the site and participant in her “Invitation to Photography” spirituality exercises.  She’s going to guest blog here soon!

As a photographer, as soon as I heard about Eyes of the Heart, I knew I wanted to read it.  I was not disappointed.  Christine is a wise writer and grand guide into the idea of combining contemplation and photography.  I appreciate this as I’ve been doing what I call “praying with my camera” for years.  In some ways, Christine’s concept is similar to Sybil MacBeth’s concept of “Praying in Color” -- an active, visual, and meditative form of intercessory prayer.

We find that the title comes from Ephesians 1:18 when Christine writes, “Photography as a spiritual practice combines the active art of image-receiving with the contemplative nature and open-heartedness of prayer.  It cultivates what I call sacred seeing or seeing with ‘the eyes of the heart.’”  Of course, this resonates with me – having written myself about learning to see deeply as a spiritual practice (Mind the Light) and the integration of body, mind, and soul to experience the Divine as we move through this world (Awaken Your Senses). 

Eyes of the Heart is filled with thoughts helpful and inspiring.  “For me, both art and spirituality are truly about tending to the moments of life: listening deeply, holding space, encountering the sacred, and touching eternity.  For a few seconds I touch time beyond time and in that spacious presence my heart grows wider, my imagination frees, my breath catches, and I am held in awe and wonder.  These are the moments that help to make life full of meaning.”  Indeed.  Words such as that are an invitation to experience God breaking through – via the means of a simple tool that many of us have in phones even, a camera.  It’s a gadget that is often thought of just as that – a gadget – rather than a entry into eternity and spiritual experience.  Christine’s book helps us broaden our spiritual horizons whether through phone camera or professional DLSRs. 

Make no mistake.  This is no book solely for photographers.  It is for anyone who desires a fresh way of connecting the visible daily life with the often unnoticed Divine presence in it all.  It opens a new way of seeing God at work in and around us.  We behold beauty, life, truth and love as we learn to notice – as we accept Christine’s invitation to “see with the eyes of the heart.”

Eyes of the Heart: Photography as a ChristianContemplative Practice by Christine Valters Paintner

Sorin Books (2013)

152 pages, paper, $15.95

30 Days of Touch -- Granola Bar

One of the "joys" of the diabetic life, as my fellow diabetics will attest, is "going low." Technically, that's known as hypoglycemia, but most of us in the diabetic cohort just call it "going low." It happens when our blood sugar goes below the normal range and it impacts us differently depending upon our body chemistry. For me, I tend to start feeling very sluggish. Then I progress (or digress) to fuzzy thinking, slurring words, and dragging my left foot when I walk. And my nose starts running.

It's the last one that bothers me... When the others happen, I tell myself I'm fine, but if my nose starts running, then I know I had better get something to eat and get my blood sugar back up into the normal ranges. Because the next step, for me, after runny nose is ... um... cussing and becoming combative. Until I slip into a sort of sleep state where I feel aware but my body just lays there.

It's not fun.

That's why I've got stuff stashed in my car, my golf bag, my camera bag, desk drawer, etc.

So of course, I never go low where that at work or golfing or in my car. I only go low in places where I don't have a stash and when I have forgotten to carry something with me.

I had gotten lax about that lately and so had some "episodes." My friend Chantale, a fellow diabetic, chided me about that, so I've been trying to be better. So today, when I went to Meeting for Worship, I stuffed my faithful standby -- a Quaker granola bar -- in my pocket. I was teaching Sunday school after worship and so knew that the possibility of needing a snack was real.

And even if I didn't, it was a comfort to know that it was there. Throughout Meeting, I felt that granola bar there. And, when Meeting was over and I stood up, my head felt a little muzzy. So out came the granola bar and back up went the blood sugar. And I was fine to teach and would be okay until I arrived at home for lunch.

As I thought about the granola bar -- that little bit of rolled oats, rice, coconut, raisins, and so on -- and how it could bring me back to life, I thought about the little things I carry with me that bring me back to life spiritually. Mine are mostly invisible, unlike more liturgical friends of mine who carry rosaries or wear crosses or have a talisman in their pocket. Mine are things like spiritual silence and sentence prayers. Things that help me regain a sense of spiritual perspective in the midst of going low spiritually.

Of course, the idea of a spiritual granola bar is just a metaphor... and sometimes nothing can stave off a low, be it physical or spiritual, but professional intervention. A doctor. Or a spiritual friend. But, for me, most of the time, a granola bar is just what the doctor ordered -- for my body or my soul.

-- Brent