Buried Treasure

God in the 'too-muchness' of our lives

Cultivating a faith and spirituality for our times 

Drawing on ancient sources and new, from the Bible to modern writers on the spiritual life, the rector reflects in this five-part series beginning September 18 on cultivating an enduring and life-giving spirituality in the 21st century. The series takes place during the Sunday Forum, held at 10:10 a.m. each Sunday between the two main morning services. No registration is needed for the Forum, which takes place in the Large Fellowship Hall and is open to the entire community. For additional information about the Sunday Forum, follow this link.

In a way, this is a series on “practical theology” – pondering practices of our faith and the theology behind them – and is meant as a theological response to the events of the past summer. When the world around us is so full of turmoil, how do we regain our spiritual bearings, our inner peace, our ability to move forward in our life with a sense of equilibrium?

After a summer of national and international tumult for all of us, as well as a time of very personal struggle and loss for some, it may be time to regroup and take stock spiritually. Gary takes as his starting point one of Jesus’ most-loved parables, the story of the Prodigal Son, because it illustrates much of what we might need to recover.

Part 1, September 18, 2016

Coming to ourselves: Remembering and renewing our relationship with God
When have we sensed that we were in the presence of God? What has been our experience of the sacred? How can remembering such experiences, and hearing the experiences of others, help us become reoriented and more faithfully situated in the present? When we are in difficult, stressful, or disorienting times – when we might feel lost, anxious, or afraid – what does it take for us to regain our spiritual bearings? How can we, like the Prodigal Son, “come to ourselves” and remember our true home and our true life in God? Sometimes what we need is to recover a sense of who God is, so that we’ll have a better sense of who or what we are looking for – “seek and you will find” (but what are we searching for?); “knock and the door will be opened to you” (but which door?). We first of all have to get our bearings, ponder, “Who is this God, this Christ, this Spirit that created and sustains us?”

Part 2, October 2, 2016

Patient trust and the basis for hope: our “Alchemist God”
There are occasions in our lives when the situation seems hopeless and we can fall prey to despair. Or the situation seems so terrible that we don’t know what to do and we are easily led to obsessive worrying or precipitous reaction. We can start to believe that if this is going to be put to rights, it is all up to us. We can start to forget God, because we are blinded by our sense of urgency, our outrage, or our anxiety. Yet, St. Paul famously said, “God works all things together for the good” (Rom. 8:28), and the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis is a testament to the transforming work of God in even the worst events of our lives. What might it mean to reclaim a sense of trust in times of fear, faithful action in times of urgency or impatience? We’ll reflect on the difference between faithful action and selfish reaction, along with spiritual disciplines that foster the former.

 
Part 3, October 16, 2016

Discerning our purpose and mission: “How can we know the way?”
The third session is about one of the most challenging aspects of the Christian life: spiritual discernment. Once we have a sense of God, once we’ve come to ourselves and we can see how we tend to go astray from time to time, what should we do? What is our unique mission, our “calling,” our purpose in life? How can we know that it is God’s call we are hearing? How can we know we are doing God’s will? We’ll consider how faithful people think about the presence and activity of God in their lives, and how we seek to be in a living relationship with God, how we co-operate with God and co-author our lives with God.

Part 4, November 20, 2016

Soaring on wings like eagles, running without weariness, or the miracle of just putting one foot in front of the other without keeling over: The experience of weakness, failure, and brokenness in the life of faith
Where is God when we feel weak, broken or have failed? How can we move forward? How do we respond to brokenness and suffering in others, especially when we just don’t know what to say or do, when we don’t know how the person might be feeling and we fear offending or making things worse somehow? Suffering and loss, brokenness and failure, weakness and death…these experiences are all part of what it means to be human, and in this session we will ponder what our faith might say about them. Some of us will do almost anything we can to shield our children from suffering and failure. We don’t want them to experience loss and spiritual defeat. But these are facts of life, and perhaps the sooner we begin to incorporate these experiences of loss and grieving into our lives, learning how to move on afterward, the better.

Part 5, November 27, 2016 (First Sunday in Advent)

A house built on rock: an enduring faith and spirituality 
We conclude this series with thoughts about spiritual practices, habits of the heart, disciplines of faith: activities that help us to renew our discipleship, stay in relationship with God through the difficult times of our lives, the disorienting events and the devastating disappointments we all experience at one time or another. Once we have a sense of “coming home” or “waking to ourselves and to God,” and once we understand how prone we are to wander and stray, what are some of the practices that can help deepen our convictions, strengthen the roots of our faith, or that “build our house on rock,” so that our faith can remain strong in times of trouble, and we can draw on our faith in time of need?