Wednesday Festival: Spiritual Practices

I’m taking a class about creating opportunities for online communities, in particular seminarians, to engage in spiritual formation. This week’s posts in our web ring also touch on our spiritual and community practices, the ways we are formed by each other and the Holy Spirit and our life experiences.

Pastor Lynn reflects on Memorial Day, a civic holiday with community implications, at her blog New Every Morning. We may react against the pressure to celebrate non-religious days, but sometimes experience teaches us more is going on than we realized:

“I hope to never pass up an opportunity to bless the people in front of me.” Amen.

hot cup shares her discipline of saying “no” to things Memorial Day-related this year and making space for the personal, something we all struggle with at times. (And all prayers and good wishes on your marriage, hot cup!)

Tara Ulrich at Praying on the Prairie asks for prayers as she strives to trust where God is taking her on the journey and engages in a new spiritual community where others share her questions about what the future holds. May these new connections work on you as you all work together, Tara!

So, can an Anabaptist use spiritual practices, or are they too “Catholic?” April Yamasaki at On Faith and Writing gives us a response to questions raised in a review of her book, Sacred Pauses: Spiritual Practices for Personal Renewal.

By the way, here’s a link to our RevGals’ Amazon Store. If you buy a book reviewed here or written by a RevGal using our Amazon store, you help support our ministry.

And if sermon-writing is one of your practices, be sure to check out the Abingdon Creative Preaching Annuals for 2014 and 2015, both featuring RevGal ring members and edited by Jenee Woodard of The Text This Week.

Speaking of preaching and spiritual practices, Mihee Kim-Kort at first day walking draws together inspirations from Pray-as-You-Go and the sermon she heard on Sunday in “Living Stones and Being Made Precious.”

revalli also writes of stones, these placed on the altar after a journey from Iona.

Self-examination is a spiritual practice. Mags Blackie asks us to consider, where are the places we are not yet free?

Here’s a video from Kara Root of her presentation at NEXT Church. What does it mean when a congregation’s spiritual practice is to be a community of discernment?

And what, instead, if our spiritual practice is denial? Jan Edmiston urges a fearless inventory of our practices in light of a bomb threat at a college graduation. We can’t be the church if people are afraid to be real together.

Here at the end of the festival, let’s return to classic spiritual practices with Rachel Hackenberg’s post about lectio divina. And don’t miss the chance to visit the Benedictines with jo(e), including a slideshow of her photographs of Baby Sheep and Sunshine.  What are your practices? If you have a blog post you want us to read, please leave a link in the comments.