What Was One of Your Spiritual Practices This Week?

3/8/22

Dear friend,

For the last little while, I've been chronicling one of my recent formation stories on Instagram. It's a story that spans years and is still being lived into now, as it's the story of how I came to be companioned in prayer by someone I call "the woman," who is my fully evolved self.

For years, and even now, she has been teaching me how to become her more and more. It's a years-long experience that's been forming me as I've followed her around, watched her, asked her questions, and slowly lived (and am living) into the person she and I are together.

(In case you'd like to read and follow along, all the installments of the story are being archived on Instagram under the hashtag #becomingthewoman_cs.)

I'm sharing this with you because for the majority of the story as I've been writing it so far, I've been telling the hardest part.

The hardest part happened between 2016–2018, when, after sustaining 3 years of immense, successive loss, I hit a wall and stopped.

I could go no further.

Now, when I say stopped, one of the main things I'm referring to is the spiritual practices that grounded my life, work, and sense of self and contribution in this life. The work of spiritual direction and spiritual formation that I had been about for many years had been grounded in a deep vocational commitment to daily contemplative practice.

Each morning, between 9AM-1PM, I sat at my desk with tea, spiritual reading, scriptures, and practices of imaginative and contemplative prayer. That time included writing too, as much of my work flowed into the world through words that took shape in my time of prayer.

When I hit the stopping point, all of that ceased.

I just couldn't do it anymore.

God and I went on a different adventure instead—one my spiritual director continued to point to and say, "Look how God is present and active here, even when you've left your contemplative practices behind."

All of which is to say, it's been a long time since I had any interest in returning to any formal sense of structure or ritual or routine in my mornings to ground my days. In all the years since that stopping time, I've continued to live in the "nurse my tumbler of coffee on the couch with my Kindle while waiting for my brain to come online" space in the mornings.

I nurture a body of spiritual practices today, yes.

But except for a few of them, they have remained more spontaneous than scheduled since that time, more in-the-moment and as needed, rather than anything structured.

And that has been quite fine.

There's no judgment on structured or spontaneous being better or worse. It's not about judgment at all.

It's about invitation. About what brings life. About where the sprouts of green shoots want to grow.

For me, this past week, I've noticed a new green shoot sprouting out of the ground, and it's a fledgling morning ritual after years of not having one.

Just a few small practices—a scribble sketch, a daybook where I write the small steps of self-care I took the previous day, a prayerbook that offers a short morning prayer for the day, that kind of thing—and I am currently finding each one of them enjoyable, grounding, or delightful.

Slowly, a new morning ritual seems to be emerging, and I'm noticing it like something coming alive that was thought long dead.

It might sound like a small thing, this cobbling together of small morning practices into some kind of routine or ritual, but in the scope of what the last ten years have held for me in this area, it is no small thing to me.

*****

Each week on Tuesday in the Light House, our members are invited to share one of their spiritual practices from the past week, along with a photo if they have one.

Today, as my own contribution to the thread, I shared this one I just shared with you—the coming together of a new morning ritual of small spiritual sprinklings of practice.

Others in the community so far today have shared:

• The completion of a collage that evidenced a longing to spend more time in nature
  

• Reading a few pages each day in Kate Bowler's Good Enough book for Lent
  

• A page for journaling gratitudes and gold stars in a notebook
  

• The creation of sacred ash for a home altar
  

• Returning to the playing of piano
  

• Stepping onto the yoga mat—and receiving dog licks on the face throughout the practice
  

• Listening to the latest album by the band Cloud Cult on repeat

I wonder what you would add to the list? What's one of your own spiritual practices from this past week?

One of the things I love about this weekly thread in the community is the variety of what's named every single time. Someone might name refinishing their bathroom floor. Another person will name lunch with a friend. Someone else sent cards of hello in the mail. Someone else visited their favorite tree.

When you think about it, anything done with intention, love, or presence can be named a spiritual practice. It encompasses all of life.

Yours in contemplative light,
Christianne